Christie Mason

I'm seeing comments regarding specific challenges of creating accessible online presentations, by product and process, buried in the introductions and thought it would be useful to begin a new thread to identify those challenges and collect practical suggestions on how to avoid those challenges.

I view the training and educational industry standards, SCORM etc, as anti-accessible. Most (all?) of the online authoring programs used by the training/educational (T & E) industries appear to continue to ignore accessibility issues, even though it's been a core focus of the web design community for years.

I wish I'd seen more web designers attracted to this discussion because, until AJAX, the concepts of making the web more usable had a strong alignment with making the web more accessible. Yes, the web design community did have "Flash Fever" for a while but that's long gone, except in T & E presentations. Web designers didn't stop using Flash and frames all the time for everything because of accessibility issues; they stopped because of pragmatic usability issues. If someone can’t use a page, understand how to navigate to that page, then that page has failed.

Try doing a "view source" on the page you're forced to use to enter a new topic  (if you're like me and have trouble finding it then click on this link http://tinyurl.com/ymmgrx,). How does this page adher to or ignore accessibility issues?  What's useful and not useful on this page and with the overall process? Look at the HTML source of this email, there’s not an alt attribute for the image (notice this is not an “alt tag” issue, “image” is the tag, “alt” is an attribute).   CSS is used but so are tables and embedded font styles along with deprecated tags.  Web standardistas would quibble about the links that open a new window but I think they're appropriate because some read their email in a browser.

Christie Mason

What applications that you've tried and would recommend that people NOT use?  Why?

Christie Mason

I'm seeing people mention applications they've used and recommend but the recommendations are buried deep into other threads so I thought starting a top level thread for recommendations might be useful.

Christie Mason

What are the barriers to using Open Source?

Christie Mason

Probably the biggest benefit of open source, that I rarely see discussed, is how it creates a community. Take a look at any popular open source application and you'll find a community.  The application provides a camp fire community for people to come together with a common interest.  If enough people are attracted, then a culture is created.  A culture that is dependent on and focused on keeping that application alive.

Some of the saddest forum entries I've ever read were in abandoned open source projects "is anyone there, why doesn't anyone reply?"

Christie Mason