I thought I would forward (with permission) this message posted by
Cheryl Wise on the GAWDs (http://www.gawds.org) mailing list, discussing
the accessability of Microsoft's new Expression web design tool.
Cheryl is an experienced accessability consultant and is reviewing the
product at http://by-expression.com/ (I believe the site is unaffiliated
with MS)
I think its *SOOOO* interesting to have what seems to be the first truly
accessable dev tool come out of Redmond! Who would have thought it? :)
Lea
--
Lea de Groot
Brisbane, Australia
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [gawds_discuss] Expression Web Designer
Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 08:37:12 -0500
From: Cheryl D Wise <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Organization: WiserWays LLC
Well FrontPage is now officially dead as in there will never be a new
version and support is on track to end under the official Microsoft policy
for such programs. (5 years active support with another 5 of security
support provided.)
The new target market for Expression is professional web designers but it is
relatively easy to use and output standards based sites. The only problem
I've had with validation on the templates that ship with it is related to
using UTF and BOM characters in stylesheets (prolog error thrown) so the
output is good. Some of us are pushing for a prompt box when images are
added while some old school people (not necessarily Microsoft people) are
resisting saying it isn't needed since you can add alt attributes through
the properties dialog. We'll see how it ends up on that one. <g>
Accessibility reports are decent and will highlight missing alt attributes,
etc. but I haven't thoroughly tested them yet. Easiest to use CSS of any
editor - no font tags produced at all (can still be hand coded in code but
anyone can screw up a site if they go into code.)
One thing I'm pleased to hear is that all SharePoint related items will be
gone before it goes gold. Expression Web Designer shared the same code base
as SharePoint Designer which will be focused on SharePoint website design
and the two products were only recently split apart. I expect to see more
differences as the CTPs progress. Frankly, when I first saw this product
(early alpha, material presented at the PDC last year) I was blown away. I
didn't think Microsoft could pull something as standards complaint as it was
then and it is getting better. As a result I lost a bet with one of the
product managers at Microsoft and next time I'm in Seattle I owe him a few
pints. It probably helps that many of the people on the Expression Team come
from places outside of Microsoft (seems a lot of the people I spoke to a MIX
06 who are working with the Expression products spent time working for
Macromedia and a very few Adobe.)
According to information posted by Wayne Smith, Senior Product Manager for
Expression Web Designer the feature set is not yet locked. This is good news
because normally by the time anyone outside of Microsoft sees something
getting changes made to the feature set is extremely difficult. I'd love to
have impressions and or feedback from GAWDs member and I've set up a website
to focus on the new Expression line so if anyone would like to contribute an
article on using Expression for accessible sites, report of using it with a
screen reader or anything else about it (or the two other items in the suite
Graphics Designer and Interactive Designer) I'd love to host it or at least
link to it if on your own site.
Cheryl D. Wise
MS FrontPage MVP
Certified Professional Web Developer
Start to Web - online web design training
Next Session May 15, 2006
See http://starttoweb.com
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