snapshot speakup survey

[Georgina]

Hi

Thanks for your comments, perhaps it might have been appropriate to discuss
some of these matters off the list.

Regarding the school college university question.  Here in the UK, school
means under 16 years old.  Thus it is a very crude tool about the age of the
user.  Plus here in the UK, Redhat are attempting to encourage schools to
use Linux, thus if any of this activity had been filtered to a visually
impaired person, it would show in the survey.  I just didn't want to
discriminate according to age.  I thought that we had a regular 13 year old
user?  This obviously raises the question that a glossary of terms should
have been provided.  I'll do it next time.

On future development.  It certainly doesn't suggest that there's any
intention to restrict support in the future, its a "snapshot" of the current
position, nothing more or nothing less.  Say, for example, 5 users used
Redhat, 30 users Debian and 100 Slackware and new installation disks needed
to be produced for 2 or all 3 of them, at the same time you have a developer
asking which job needs doing?  Thus this is a tool to help in the
prioritising process.  Such tools are vital to the efficient progress of all
projects.  If we know what the starting line looks like then we can run the
race but if we don't know where it is we've got no chance.

I hope that the above answers some of your questions.

Gena

-----Original Message-----
From: speakup-admin at braille.uwo.ca
[mailto:speakup-admin at braille.uwo.ca]On Behalf Of Janina Sajka
Sent: 03 December 2001 19:44
To: speakup at braille.uwo.ca
Subject: Re: snapshot speakup survey


No problems executing the survey here with lynx 2.8.4rel.1 (17 Jul 2001)

I don't see much in the way of accessibility issues with this form. I do
have a couple of points, however:

Link elements should be clearly intelligible on their own--without any
need to access surrounding text. UTRLs labeled "link," for example, are
not good practice. The applicable WAI guideline is intended to support
users who navigate through urls via various browser access technologies
and may not have direct access to the surrounding text in the process;

The form itself does not validate with HTML Tidy. I did not try
http://validator.w3.org, but would not expect a different result there.
Valid html is, of course, the foundation of good accessibility practices
on web pages, and I believe we should model what we preach as much as
practical;

In the first question, "Where do you use speakup?," what is meant by
"school" as opposed to "college or university?" In other words, wouldn't
everyone checking off "college or university" also check off "school,"
inasmuch as a college or a university is certainly a school by all
accepted usages of English?;

What, exactly, is this survey supposed to discover? It perports to be
about future developments, but only questions regarding curent use are
asked. Are we to surmise that some users will receive support in the
future, while others will not? Certainly this can't be the case. So, what,
exactly, is this survey supposed to show?


--

				Janina Sajka, Director
				Technology Research and Development
				Governmental Relations Group
				American Foundation for the Blind (AFB)

Email: janina at afb.net		Phone: (202) 408-8175

Chair, Accessibility SIG
Open Electronic Book Forum (OEBF)
http://www.openebook.org

Will electronic books surpass print books? Read our white paper,
Surpassing Gutenberg, at http://www.afb.org/ebook.asp

Download a free sample Digital Talking Book edition of Martin Luther
King Jr's inspiring "I Have A Dream" speech at
http://www.afb.org/mlkweb.asp

Learn how to make accessible software at
http://www.afb.org/accessapp.asp


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