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Thread: RE: Commercial accessibility tools

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From: julian.rickards@ndm.gov.on.ca
Date: Thu, May 15 2003 9:13AM
Subject: RE: Commercial accessibility tools
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We use LIFT with FrontPage. We (our government ministry) purchased it in the
Fall of 2002 and used it to make our pages as accessible as we could with it
- we were working to make our web sites accessible by December 31, 2002. My
opinion is that it helps but it is not the cat's behind although we have not
upgraded since December. For the expense, I would not recommend it because
it still requires a sound knowledge of HTML and WCAG (or Section 508) and
CSS. The tool becomes a plugin to FP and we got it to work with FP2000 and
FP2002. There are features in FP2002 that are not present in FP2000 so to
insert a title= attribute requires manual entry. I find that FP is not very
good with CSS and so it did not fully meet our needs.

LIFT could have been a powerful tool for making data tables accessible
because in most cases, it detected simple, moderate and complex tables and
was prepared to adjust the coding appropriately. However, some tables, after
coding properly, were still detected as incorrect by LIFT.

> Has anyone done a commercial accessibility tool comparison or
> have any
> experience with or opinions of: ...


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From: Michael Goddard
Date: Thu, May 15 2003 10:41AM
Subject: RE: Commercial accessibility tools
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I think that this tool has been designed for people who have a pretty good
grasp or knowledge of the tools of the trade (HTML, XHTML, CSS, WCAG and
Sect. 508).

No tool is going to replace common sense. I am a firm believer that if you
are in the business of creating web pages or developing web sites/intranets
etc. Then you SHOULD have a strong background knowledge of the tools listed
above and not be relying on tools such as LIFT, FrontPage or Dreamweaver to
be the magic pixie dust! I honestly don't see how any site created in
FrontPage could be made accessible based on the WCAG or Section 508 without
having to manually edit the code. Too much proprietary code is generated by
the tool.

My point: Commercial tools are ok to work with, but nothing replaces the
knowledge of knowing the material and working with it hands on!

My .2

Michael

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Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2003 12:07 PM
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Subject: RE: Commercial accessibility tools


We use LIFT with FrontPage. We (our government ministry) purchased it in the
Fall of 2002 and used it to make our pages as accessible as we could with it
- we were working to make our web sites accessible by December 31, 2002. My
opinion is that it helps but it is not the cat's behind although we have not
upgraded since December. For the expense, I would not recommend it because
it still requires a sound knowledge of HTML and WCAG (or Section 508) and
CSS. The tool becomes a plugin to FP and we got it to work with FP2000 and
FP2002. There are features in FP2002 that are not present in FP2000 so to
insert a title= attribute requires manual entry. I find that FP is not very
good with CSS and so it did not fully meet our needs.

LIFT could have been a powerful tool for making data tables accessible
because in most cases, it detected simple, moderate and complex tables and
was prepared to adjust the coding appropriately. However, some tables, after
coding properly, were still detected as incorrect by LIFT.

> Has anyone done a commercial accessibility tool comparison or
> have any
> experience with or opinions of: ...


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visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/





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