Hi Gail,
Thank you *very* much for all your excellent work on
the new IPP web pages. It's much appreciated!
Per our brief discussion of 'accessiblity' (for folks
with PDAs, cell-phones, screen readers, etc.) on this
morning's IPP WG Telecon, the first and best resource
is the W3C's WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative):
http://www.w3.org/WAI/
Take a look particularly at the Web Content Accessibility
Guidelines (WCAG) and their associated 'checklist'. For
HTML-literate folks, I think the WCAG and checklist are
pretty directly usable (and well-reasoned). In Australia,
Portugal, and Spain (at least) conformance to single-A
(first level) WCAG checkpoints is a legal requirement.
More importantly, it's good business to make Web content
gracefully accessible to as many users over as many
interfaces as possible. For example, executives with
buying decision authority are quite often users of PDAs
or cell-phones with Web browsing interfaces.
It is *not* best practice to build 'separate but equal'
Web pages. I'm not an HTML expert, but the concensus on
the WAI Interest Group mailing list (which is full of
experts) is that the business of building 'accessibility'
into Web pages is fairly well understood art at this point.
A wealth of links to good stuff can be found off the WAI
home page via:
http://www.w3.org/WAI/References
The validation tool 'Bobby' (built by CAST) is an excellent
place to start (you send Bobby your base URL and get back
a detailed report on your accessibility rating). Since
Bobby is an automated tool, it *can* be fooled, but it's
a good first-line checker.
The WAI Interest Group list is *high* traffic (10-30 messages
per day), but is utterly fascinating reading.
Cheers,
- Ira McDonald (consulting architect at Sharp Labs America)
High North Inc
-----Original Message-----
From: Gail Songer [mailto:gsonger at peerless.com]
Sent: Monday, February 28, 2000 4:51 PM
To: ipp at pwg.org
Subject: IPP> New Web Pages
Hi all!
With a lot of help from Carl-Uno, the new IPP web pages are ready for
action!
Have a look and please free to send me your comments!
http://pwg.org/ipp/index.html
Gail