Mosaic '94: Accessibilty IS an ISSUE

Mike Paciello, VIIS: 381-1831 (paciello@shane.enet.dec.com)
Wed, 28 Sep 94 11:07:54 EDT


I have received the following mail from TV Raman, a blind Web user and creater
of AsTeR. Please note that Dr. Raman is an expert in this field and will be
attending Mosaic '94. He and I are very interested in pursuing the issues
related to access to the WEB, MOSAIC, and people with disabilties.

Thus far, I have received a few brief replies from folks at the NCSA. I
really appreciate this. However, we are looking for committment and
communication from you.

At the moment, I am not funded (nor financially in a position) to attend
Mosaic '94. I am working on this. One way or another, I plan to get there.

Please feel free to contact me so that we can organize a meeting in Chicago.

Regards,

Michael G. Paciello
Digital Equipment Corporation
Program Manager
Vision Impaired Information Services (VIIS)
110 Spit Brook Road
Nashua, NH. USA 03062
Phone: (603) 881-1831
Internet: Paciello@Shane.Enet.Dec.Com
President: International Committee for Accessible Document Design (ICADD)
Member: Electronics Industries Association/Assistive Devices Division (EIA/ADD)
Member: Project EASI

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Hi Mike,

I just sent the following to the html-wg list (html working group).
Could you also forward the note to the icadd list?

There seems to be considerable interest at the Mosaic94 conference in making
the WWW accessible to the print-impaired.

Most of the emphasis is being placed on the WWW browsers. Though it is
important to have accessible browsers, they're useless if the information
present on the WWW is not encoded in an accessible format.

Given that there has been some interest on this list on the issues of making
HTML and ICAD converge, as well as making HTML friendlier to applications
producing output in alternative formats, could we pull together a meeting at
the Mosaic conference to address these questions?

Main thrust:

An accessible WWW requires accessible document encodings.
We may design the world's best accessible WWW browser, say one that produces
speech or Braille, but it'd be absolutely useless if the documents on the WWW
were gif, ps or pdf files!

--Raman