[Irl-dean] Re: Accessibility of CHM Format Resources

[Joshue O Connor]

Thanks for that Donal. I enjoyed your piece and there some points that I 
wish to <echo>:

>Public money would be better spent in 
>building capacity within public sector organisations around producing 
>content that is accessible to the widest demographic possible than using 
>it to outsource content for conversion to a supposedly inexpensive but 
>ultimately inaccessible format.
>
Definitely - and vendors coming into the market offering better 
"alternatives" to accessible HTML are not helping the "cause".
It's just confusing people more.

>We in the public sector need to learn 
>form our mistakes such as using PDF as the default format as on most civil 
>service sites.
>

Yes - very much so . This is an excellent point. Many county council 
offices and other government departments are beginning to see the error 
of using PDF as a document format and also the headache and Herculean 
task of conversion to an accessible one!!

*NB*(Regardless of future promises of PDF use for creating accessible 
documents the fact is - there are an awful lot of "old school" PDF's 
that will need to be converted to HTML or semantically marked up Word 
Doc's - not an enviable task)

</echo>

Josh O Connor

Web Accessibility Consultant

**Centre for Inclusive Technology (CFIT)* *
National Council for the Blind of Ireland

joshue.oconnor at ncbi.ie +353 1 8821915