Hi,I undrstand your point, but the current system appears to address a variety of issues. We have highspeed and modem clients, blind and sighted users, there are many different groups. We are developing a product that will be targeted towards screen readers as a browsing mode for the current system. I fell, after testing the current system, and so does my team at GLBase, that the decition to have an accessible screen reader for visual impairments is to hard from the original system. The university bought the source code, and is having a whole lot of trouble trying to get it working for sighted users as it is, adapting existing looks and feels, which kater to the widest spectrum possible. Unfortunetly the developers of the code didn't think of screen readers when designing the code as they made it har as anything to read. I man, they duplicated every link, made contravercy between to of the same links, and a whole other coding nightmare. The decition comes after testing, and after the proposal to make the university accessible for the blind.
Remember, my power is very limited as far as what my team does, and dealing with deffness and dislecksia are not looked at by my team. I regretfuly say that developing a screen reader version as a browsing mode, which is ultimately our goal, is the goal of this project. We have removed most of the elements, stacked them differently and provided the same content in a different format. We don't want to discriminate, far from it my fellow mail listers,. We at the AWEBSIGHT Advocacy Group of BC, Canada, strive to make the world more accessible to everyone in the best way possible. Thanks for your words of wisdom, Alex, On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Alex Jurgensen` wrote: > >> I spoke to my senior programer about my issue, and I received the response >> that we need a simple, compact interface optimized for screen readers and >> modifying the existing source code would take several years to do. >> > > Maybe this should be approached from the opposite angle. > > You have a current system, which is inaccessible to screen reader users > (and likely others too - has any evaluation been done of that?). You have a > proposal to build a new system, which provides the same core content and > functionality but is screen reader accessible. (If it doesn't provide the > same core content and functionality, and it is possible to build an > accessible system to provide it, then blind users are still being > discriminated against.) > > At work, I happen to deal with large websites, am familiar with the > problems of trying to put in radical fixes to legacy code, and recognize > some potential advantages to beginning afresh. > > Rather than suggesting the current, cranky system should be fixed, perhaps > the best approach is to build up towards the content, functionality, and > ultimately look-and-feel (or at least, the goods bits of look-and-feel) of > the current system from a new accessible base. > > Of course, this would involve considering the needs of all users, not just > sighted and blind users as radically distinct groups, which they aren't. > (They are actually more like a spectrum or even a kaleidoscope, with > offshoots into all sorts of other disabilities that an educational > institution should be thinking about in its service provision, like > deafness, dyslexia, and motor disabilities.) > > -- > Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis > > -- Alex A.AWEBSIGHT administrator AWEBSIGHT web team "Blindness is a gift, not a disability." B.C unit <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.VisionMail.uni.cc/
