I have found companies and governments to be totally unresponsive to
standards.
In the USA esp. target, but also Walmart etc. The American government
couldn't care less.
Most sites fail S.508 testing even their best "Ivy league" Universities.
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/USAweb.html
The Australian governments AGIMO says "near enough is good enough"
Australia companies are a little better but only the small companies
lead the way.
The Aussi McFarlane awards for web excellence, Not a corporate is sight!
http://www.hereticpress.com/Editorials/Editorial06.html#McFarlane
Australian Newspapers and media and TV stations have pathetic websites.
http://www.hereticpress.com/Dogstar/Publishing/AustWeb.html
Legal cases promote standards for all companies and .gov
Small companies lead the way. OK ?
Tim
On 01/12/2006, at 12:09 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I totally agree with your point about accessible content, which is why
we have
contributed towards Joe Clark's micropatronage project to raise money
for
research into the production of standards, training and certification
schemes
for captioning, audio description, subtitling, and dubbing.
http://joeclark.org/micro/
We spend a lot of time advising companies (corporates actually are a
lot more
responsive than small companies, believe it or not) on how to create
accessible content. Web standards are an important part of this, but
are not
enough on their own. We also run free screen reader demonstrations for
developers to help them understand the issues relating to those users.
www.accessibility.co.uk/free_jaws_demo.htm
I made my previous comments because I think it's important to
differentiate
between the measures that designers should be expected to take (the
technologies they use, alternate content etc), the capabilities we
should
expect from user agents and the measures users should take such as
using
appropriate user agents and learning to make best use of them. The
onus is on
all these groups to play their part, not just the developers.
Steve
Leslie Riggs <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You're talking to someone who deals with accessibility frustrations
every single day of her life.
I'd sure like to see that all spoken audio in electronic media (video
games, video clips of newscasts on the Internet, etc.) be
captioning/subtitling-enabled (can be turned on or off by the user).
Unrealistic? I guess. Do you understand what I am saying? It
doesn't
have to be just a browser plug-in or a user agent. Perhaps I was
being
too subtle in my previous post.
I get very tired of receiving snippy responses to my politely framed
emails to corporations requesting they consider making transcripts of
audio files and audio information in video clips available for
download,
if they're not going to consider captioning/subtitling video clips.
I'm
not asking for song lyrics, but I would sure like to know what those
presenters were saying during the latest news releases, or emergency
weather bulletins on those video clips on many news sites. Then there
is the "off-camera" dialogue that is inaccessible to someone who
cannot
hear or understand it. Don't they want to reach the maximum possible
audience and with the greatest impact?
Web standards do help with respect to the Web and site design and so
forth. Web accessibility standards make an attempt to improve things
beyond the established Web standards.
But it's not just an accessibility issue. It's also a functional
equivalency issue. The trends in accessibility improvements are
heartening, but we have a long way to go.
Leslie Riggs
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