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Election 2006 (and beyond): Digital Copyright Canada
From: russell_-at-_flora.ottawa.on.ca (Russell McOrmond)
Date: 26 Aug 2000 16:26:46 -0400
--- Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://russell.flora.org/work/> Elect Joan Russow in Okanagan-Coquihalla <http://www.voterussow.org/> Elect Ralph Nader for U.S. President! <http://www.votenader.org/> Elect Mark Coakley in Ancaster-Dundas-.. <http://www.mark-coakley.com/> ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 26 Aug 2000 02:15:10 -0400 From: Judyth Mermelstein <espresso@E-SCAPE.NET> Reply-To: cpi-ua@vcn.bc.ca To: volnet@IC.GC.CA Cc: cpi-ua@vcn.bc.ca, club-libertel@cam.org Subject: [CPI-UA]: Inaccessibility of VolNet Learner's Guide Gentlemen, ladies, Recently I visited your Web site in the hopes of reading the VolNet Learner's Guide, which I believed might be useful to people here in the Montreal area. Since I was under the impression that your programme was designed to assist non-profit organizations in learning to use the Internet and that the Government of Canada was sufficiently aware of accessibility guidelines to make compliance an official policy, I was deeply disappointed with what I found on your site. It appears that, far from wanting to make the Learner's Guide accessible to everyone, you believe it is sufficient to make it available to people and organizations which can afford high-end equipment and have no disabilities. Making your guide available for download only as a PDF file in Acrobat 4.x format effectively makes it UNavailable to a great many people. The Acrobat Reader 4 software may be free but the equipment to meet its system requirements is not, and a good many NGOs and community groups lack computers with adequate RAM, processor speed and hard disk space. Version 4x of the Acrobat Suite does allow one to make PDFs using the format readable by Acrobat Reader 3, which would be somewhat more accessible, but even that is not ideal if you genuinely want information compiled with public funds to be accesible to all Canadians. >From the site itself, it would seem you realize this insofar as you provide a link for those who cannot handle the PDF file. Unfortunately, although the site says that link leads to an HTML version, what one finds instead is a set of 295 Powerpoint slides with links allowing a person to click through them one by one if one doesn't happen to have the latest version of PowerPoint. Doubly unfortunately, I can neither read the PowerPoint format on the site with a text browser nor download the slides and read them with another software -- and neither can a good many other people. What the World Wide Web was designed for was to make information available to everyone, regardless of which computer or software they use. Recently, however, the ability to embellish sites with proprietary software for the benefit of those whose systems are "state of the art" and are most likely to have disposable income for online shopping has resulted in sites which are no longer for everyone. Meanwhile, since employees of the Government of Canada DO have access to high-end equipment and expensive brand-name software regularly updated, it appears they have forgotten that not all Canadians are so fortunate and that many have disabilities which require text on sites so that their text-to-speech software will work. I believe the reason for the announcement that the Government of Canada would move to comply (in part, at least) with the W3 Consortium's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines <http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT> was the recognition that the goal of "connecting all Canadians" simply cannot be met without the recognition that Canadians are not all equally affluent or equally able. They may also have recognized what others saw long ago: that there is something inherently unfair about switching from "public information available to all" to "public information available to those with Windows 95 or better and money for a high-speed connection" is anti-democratic rather than merely undemocratic. The "digital divide" is real and will continue as long as the government does not provide all Canadians with Internet access and the means to use it, or at least allows the less-fortunate to obtain the same services as the affluent and unhandicapped using whatever equipment and software they can get. I belong to a non-profit group which hopes to help groups and individuals learn and use information technology, an effort in which both recycled older equipment and publicly-funded information sources will necessarily play a part. On behalf of those as-yet-unconnected Canadians, I ask you to kindly make your site more accessible as soon as possible. To ensure that your publications are accessible, please provide them as HTML or plain text as well as whatever proprietary formats you like to use. Thank you for your co-operation. Sincerely, Judyth Mermelstein (Club Libertel Montreal) ###################################################### Judyth Mermelstein "cogito ergo lego ergo cogito..." Montreal, QC <espresso@e-scape.net> ###################################################### ___________________________________________________________ hosted by Vancouver Community Network http://www.vcn.bc.ca
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