Hi Larry, On Friday, June 21, 2002, at 10:31 AM, Larry Price wrote:
> On Fri, 21 Jun 2002, Dennis Eberl wrote: > >> The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI), which I have been reading and >> which >> I believe came out of W3C, strikes me as naive and ineffective. The real >> hope, as I see it, is XML/XSL. By separating content from formate in a >> rigorous way, one can for a web site, you obviously make it possible to >> play that info out in whatever way best fits a handicapped person. > > XML is only one part of the puzzle though, the real gains come with > the embedding of semantics into publicly available information. > So you could for instance request the address of your doctor's office > and extract just the chunk of text that defines the address from your > doctor's website. XML/XSLT are the building blocks on which this type > of semantic encoding is going to be built, but there are a lot of > other pieces that come into play. I am sure you are right. I am a complete novice (if even that) when it comes to XML and everything related to it. I am very interested in the possiblities though, which is an incentive to learn. The kind of thing that interest me, an example. A blind person is braille reading a novel and comes across a word that's new to him. How does he look it up. The braille printer should have a simple way to immediatedly pop onto the net and grap a definition, even a spoken one. Why is the blind person using braille to read? Because he or she decided to be actively engaged in being literate, not a passive listener to someone reading a novel, where words the meaning of which one does not know easily slide by not understood. See where I'm coming from? >> Since in the real world (i.e., where most of us live, right?), people who >> design web pages barely have the funding and time or page design and >> written language skills to properly create a web site for someone with no >> visual, auditory, or cognitive impairments, there is _no_ hope they will >> get around to even trying to follow the WAI guidelines. > > At some point the advantages of moving to a semantically enabled > content model will be so obvious that it will be economically feasible > for someone to automate the process for legacy content; whether that > someone is the content providers/owners or the search engines, the > browsers, or some other group yet to emerge is still up in the air. Yes, I agree. I wouldn't bet on the information provider's swallowing the cost and believe the best solution would be plug-in technology on the client's side. That's open up the world to severely handicapped people a heck of a lot faster IMHO. I'd love to work on these kind of solutions but don't know where to look having no formal training or real knowledge of the field. Any pointers you might have would be appreciated. >> As XML becomes more and more accessible and more an more used, it is my >> hope that one could create on the client side a browser that is adapted >> to >> a handicapped person's special needs. I believe this is a more realistic >> approach (i.e., a browser plug in). My special interest is in the needs >> of >> those who are totally blind. > > Have you made contact with Mobility International? <snip> Nope. What are they. Will google them now. Thanks. Dennis
