anti-word

[Rich Caloggero]

I think the real issue for many here is that of, well, money!
If a sighted person goes and buys a computer, and they decide to get a
windows box, they can take it home and use it right away (out of the box).
When a blind person buys a windows box (yup, I actually did because I wanted
to use cakewalk, and no such software exists in an accessible form for any
other OS), they need to spend another nonsignificant lump of cash (probably
at least half of what the computer is worth or more) just to be able to use
it. After all the cash is laid out, we can't even make *full* use of it, and
to make matters worse, the screen reader is usually one of the main
culprates in causing crashes or other system-level missbehaviors.

Having said all that, I think word is a defacto standard, and if you have
the means (a box with a windows screen reader and a copy of word), then you
should know how to use it to either read the document, or produce an rtf or
txt document for yourself. If you get sent a word document to edit, you need
to send back a word document with your changes included. Whether we like it
or not, sighted people like word and have demonstrated this by spending cash
to obtain it. To be fair, it does do just about everything required of a
decent, powerful, and fairly straightforward (if your sighted) document
publishing environment.

To add more fuel to the fire, there is a project (several in fact) here at
MIT to make courseware available on-line for all institute courses. A number
of frameworks are being tried, but the consensus seems to be that HTML ain't
good enough. People have gravitated to, -- hold on to your hats -- PDF as
the format of choice. If not PDF, word is also acceptable.  This is, in the
minds of the humble folks at the MIT Access Tech Lab, a very bad thing! I
believe PDF is popular in the academic world because it provides fairly
rigorous copyright protection. Both word and PDF are binary files, so you
need the right software to read them, which makes copyright protection
easier to enforce. HTML could be read without even a browser with a bit of
effort. MIT and other private institutions are not covered by ADA
regulations (508 etc), at least this is my understanding. Please tell me
otherwise if this is not true.

Just my two cents...

                    Rich Caloggero
                    MIT ATIC


----- Original Message -----
From: "Charles Crawford" <ccrawford at acb.org>
To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2002 12:15 PM
Subject: Re: anti-word


> Hi,
>
> Well I guess I did not want to get into a big duscussion of this, but you
> raise points worth answering and thanks for doing so.
>
> People will not know anything about anything unless there is an original
> introduction to it.  So if the Prof get a text file, then he would seek to
> know how to handle it.  Just as his becoming enlightened by your reference
> to notepad, so too would he be in a position to understand use a text
> document.  Whether a text document is appropriate to the setting is a good
> question though.
>
> If we left it at that, then all would be more or less settled, but what
> about our rights as blind folks to access?  Are they conditioned upon
> having to use what the employer for example uses?  Well, the truth is that
> they aare.  An employer has the right to utilize any software they want
and
> as long as we too can use it, then we have to learn it.
>
> So the challenge to blind linux users is to relate to the windows world
> not as an us versus them, but as a reality check on others who use
> windows.  It gets a bit tricky because of the accessibility issues and the
> relative ease of use issue.  If we have to go climbing mountains that
> others do not have to climb to use a product, then that is not equal
> access, but our success in getting at least a couple of Windows programs
to
> work well with access techincurrs a rsponsibility on our part to use that
> technology when required.
>
> So we are back where we began.  We may not like having to use Ms-Word or
> Ms-anything, but if it is the standard that is accessible as well, then we
> have to do it.  Responding to an MS-Word attachment with a text file is ok
> since it equally affords the reader with the same information presented in
> a different format.
>
> Would like to write more, but there goes that phone again.
>
> -- charlie Crawford.
>
>
>