How can we make sure to include in this New Era people who can't see?

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You might have guessed I'd get here at some point banging on about Accessibility. I'm in a F'book group called 'The Official Petition for a More Accessible Facebook'. They have changed some of the accessibility options and made it very difficult to use with screenreaders and if you have poor vision. There's also been a lot of discussion in the past few days on the Disability Forum mailing list about 'Wikis/Twikis and Blogs' and their accessibility and a link to ALERT, a website giving guidelines on making VLEs more accessible (which hasn't been updated for a while). Also an interesting post:

"We must also be demanding of their publishers that authoring tools be more accessibility aware. Editors like XStandard at least encourage accessible writing and discourage bad habits. We must be aiming at Incidental Obligatory Accessibility where the editor or environment encourages or even insists that you, for example:

* Use styles for heading, formatting and bullets (not random bolds and font changes);
* Provide alt text for images and labels for tables;
* Not to mention providing text descriptions for video etc;
* And even tag reading order in columnar or boxed text.

To be fully accessible will always require some technical knowledge which it is probably not reasonable to expect the lay author to have. But the tools we have to use could be much more helpful than they are. And that will only come if we shout and complain to software publishers. Post Hoc Accessifying is always going to be a pain. IOA is at least partly possible, a good discipline and not too much extra trouble. If we have the tools.

Ian Litterick
Associate member of Right to Read steering committee"

Out of interest, how does everyone find this Wiki in looks and navigation??

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