Hi, Excuse me for jumping in here, especially (in this case) as a Flash partisan. But I fail to see how this kind of project can be anything other than a good thing overall.
What I don't understand is why people are instantly critical of projects that are actually attempting to increase access to new technology. I've heard a constant drumbeat of "don't use Flash: it's inaccessible" in the years I've been involved in the field. But if we don't have people pushing that envelope, doesn't that make that statement self-fulfilling prophecy? There are lots of us out there working on improving the accessibility of both existing and future content authored in Flash. There are many arguments to be made for HTML -- I made loads of them while working for W3C, all of which I would stand by today -- but it is not all things to all people. The fact is that many educators have found that they can use Flash to teach their students effectively. I'm not an educator by profession, but my wife is, and she prefers Flash over HTML/CSS/JS to develop her courseware. If you were to tell her she's wrong, especially before seeing what kind of work she does, I think you'd probably find yourself dodging a couple shelves' worth of education texts. Telling a professional their tools are wrong is not the most endearing of approaches. In my opinion, the best one can do is to learn what they're doing, and offer ways to make that output more efficient, more inclusive, and easier to produce. Teachers aren't usually web developers, and we shouldn't want them to be. So I'm all for companies taking on the technical problems so teachers can be teachers, and so on. Thanks, M Accessibility Engineer, Adobe Christie Mason said: > Exactly right. I've sadly watched Flash take over eLearning and still > haven't figured out the attraction, except that it offers the control of PPT > while appearing to be "rich". There's only a very few types of web sites > that still use Flash for delivering primary content - media sites, those > that focus more on "look at me" instead of being a resource to their site > guests, and eLearning. > Since, supposedly, eLearning is about offering web based resources for > learning it just doesn't make sense to me that it has ignored all the ways > the web has supported, continues to support, learning w/o using Flash. > Flash on the web is like cooking with garlic. A little adds depth, a lot is > inedible. ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: memberh...@webstandardsgroup.org *******************************************************************