Accessible collaborative documents

Despite the pooh-poohing of the for­mat, I am still back­ing the idea of a uni­ver­sal acces­si­ble web pol­icy for devel­op­ers. But lets take a step back and take care of the for­mat issue first. I chose to pub­lish this in a Word Doc, because every­body I know uses word to edit and write con­tent (includ­ing those with screen read­ers). It also has some fea­tures for track­ing changes, which we have already used on this doc­u­ment within my office.

So lets hear some con­struc­tive ideas on what for­mat we should all be work­ing in, as I am going to try and drag more peo­ple into this. I looked into Wikis a lit­tle bit, but it didn’t seem like a great fit for this project. Using and XML or HTML doc­u­ment seems like it might exclude peo­ple who don’t work with those formats.

Go.

  1. Jeff– I think you’ve made a good choice with the Word Doc, but you may also want to recon­sider a wiki. There would be some setup, but it con­denses the steps of down­load, turn on track changes, edit, save, send back to author to just edit and save online– and most types of wiki soft­ware have good track­ing fea­tures built-in.

  2. Kenny Page says:

    Guys — not want­ing to rub­bish the whole idea, espe­cially as i’m post­ing long after dis­cus­sions have started, but..

    Would it not be more ben­e­fi­cial to build an open source web acces­si­bil­ity ver­i­fi­ca­tion tool sim­i­lar to the old offline Bobby java application?

    If you think back, the wider web design com­mu­nity *used* to have a tool, now they don’t.

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