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

Besides the other barriers that I've mentioned, I see two trends that could be classified as threats.

1. Fee based middlemen like IBM etc separating the consumer of the code from maintenance/improvement of the code.

2. Becoming popular.  As you read the support forums for some of the most popular open source applications, you start to notice the types of questions changing from "where in the application is XYZ set"  to very basic, general questions like "how do I create a connection string, what is a variable, what is a field, how do I install MySQL"?   As those types of questions clog the support area it becomes difficult to discuss valid application bugs and workarounds .  I don't know how far that trend will go, but it's been disquieting to see it begin.

It's assumed that you know the basics before you use open source applications and attempting to use open source applications just because they're "free" can cause difficulties for all levels of users.

Christie Mason

I'd love to have a plain explanation about the differences between BSD and GPL licenses.  Sometimes the differences seem clear to me and then I'll read something else which makes it all murky again.

Christie Mason

Very, very true.  Plus, they do like to upgrade/patch often.  And, there rarely are any notification channels to let you know when a upgrade/patch has been published unless you check in often.  I've often wondered why most don't just offer an RSS feed.  If you're a casual user of an application you really won't invest the time to stay update and one unsecured module can make your whole system unsecure.

Something that's often claimed for open source, and Firefox vs IE is a great example, is that it's more secure than commercial software because there are more eyes focused on finding/fixing holes.  I think that may be true for OSS with large communities, but not so true for smaller communities.  Less eyes = less secure.

Christie Mason

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

Christie Mason