I will agree that JAWS is an over-priced piece of software. IBM HomePage Reader is much more reasonable. But, then again Lynx with voice would be good as well.
Have you looked at the other assistive technologies available? England and the other countries requiring accessible web sites state 508 did not meet their requirements for accessible web sites. So, how can we state that Section 508 is the end-all solution when other governments are saying it isn't enough? AT developers have the User Agent Accessibility Guidelines they have to follow. There is at least one person from the JAWS team on the working group. Since JAWS uses Internet Explorer and the Microsoft Accessibility Agent, I would hope that Microsoft starts supporting standards better than they do. And that they stop with their proprietary stuff. Netscape has begun to support OBJECT so we don't need to use EMBED/NOEMBED any longer unless you want to support earlier versions. Oh my, do we want to support Netscape 4.x? I don't and don't even come close to trying any longer. Thanks for the feedback. Sincerely, Lee Roberts -----Original Message----- From: J Rodgers [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, June 29, 2004 3:26 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [WSG] 508?? Perhaps one of the biggest problems with accessibility is the lack of affordable assistive technologies (AT)? I think W3 complaint code mixed with some decent features should be all that is required on the developers end. The government would be better off spending more time and resources on supporting the development of text readers (lynx with a freaky voice) that do not cost $2500 a seat. You will note some the latest version of Jaws can handle junk code pretty well - no excuse for junk code mind you - but there has to be some middle ground. The problem with the WCAG is it's so academic, at least section 508 made an attempt to quantify exactly what makes a site accessible and encourages AT creators along with Dreamweaver-esque CMS developers to conform to something they can understand. Who is encouraging the AT developers to support web standards? Bah.. Jaws is really starting to freak me out. Jesse On 6/29/04 12:49 PM, "Lee Roberts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Section 508 picked and chose which elements they thought was correct > without even attempting to understand the problems faced by assistive technologies. > Section 508 has elements from Priority 2 and Priority 3 while skipping > some elements from Priority 1. Now, that's interesting - they skip > required elements in lieu of lower priority elements. ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help ***************************************************** ***************************************************** The discussion list for http://webstandardsgroup.org/ See http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm for some hints on posting to the list & getting help *****************************************************
