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Re: usablenet's text transponder

for

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Jan 18, 2007 8:00AM


Cheryl Amato wrote on 18 January 2007 09:02EST:
> Does anyone have any experience with Usablenet's text transponder?
> And how do people feel about the accessibility of automatically
> generating text only pages of a web site? Doesn't that set up an us
> vs. them scenario? A separate but equal?

There was some discussion about the Usablenet Text Transcoder on this list
in July 2006, and that discussion is available on the AIM list archive:

LIFT Text Transcoder
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=2985

Also, you might want to check out the following related thread from the same
time period (this link actually points to several threads since the archive
did not collect them all into a single thread for some reason):

Example of LIFT Text Transcoder solving complex accessibility issues
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_archive.php?sort_by=1&;from=242

And there are a couple threads on a similar subject dating back to 2003 and
2004:

[FWD] Universities Legal Web Accessibility Update (November 2003)
http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?thread=1697&;id=3981
and
LIFT Transcoder being pimped (August 2004)
http://www.webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread.php?id=4859

I would note that it looks like UsableNet renamed its product some time in
the fall of 2006, from its old name "LIFT Text Transcoder" to a new name
"Lift Assistive". Here is a link to the most recent version of their
product page:
http://www.usablenet.com/products_services/lift_assistive/lift_assistive.htm
l

I am not sure whether the new product is basically just an incremental
update to the LIFT Text Transcoder or if the new name represents a more
radical change in the product.

Phil.