So, In hopes of helpfullness, I'll provide some comments marked with *dp*
for some of the questions in your message below:

Johnnie Apple Seed

----- Original Message -----
From: "Martin, Terry" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 21, 2004 11:12 AM
Subject: Accessible web sites.


Greetings All:

I would like to ask a few questions regarding accessible web sites.  I am
gathering some information.  If you have the time, I'd greatly appreciate
your responses.  I know the answers to some of the questions.  However, my
knowledge of evaluating sites is several years old.  I'd like to get an idea
of what is going on in the world now. Here are my questions.

1.  If you had the choice to rebuild a site from scratch that was not
accessible or retrofit a site that was not accessible, what would you do?
Why? The size of the site does not matter.  Small or large sites.
*dp* Rebuild the site since there is probably going to be a lot that cannot
be gracefully retrofitted necessitating a lot of re-writing anyway.

2.  What tools seem to be the best tools out there to evaluate a site for
Section 508 and W3C standards?  Tools that are affordable and that can
evaluate an entire site.
*dp* Affordable is subjective but I have found software from:
http://www.hisoftware.com
to be more than adequate for the task.

3.  Has anyone used any of the enterprise editions of tools that can
evaluate sites?  How expensive are they?  How well did they work?

4.  If you have evaluated sites for companies or schools, did they allow you
to work on the site to fix the problem or did you just point out the problem
areas and then their development team fixed the problems?
*dp* The team fixes the site or the contractor I team up with fixes the site
and then we do more evaluating.

5.  If you can, I'd like to hear some of your success and horror stories.
*dp* I'm not sure what you are asking for here, but My experiences over the
past several years range from quite positive to no feedback/change at all.
I've gotten fairly good though at approaching the positive end result.  One
success story envolves the design of a complex distance learning site with a
gifted developper who was able to solve all the issues we found but it took
a lot of work as the interface was quite complex.  Failures usually
manifested in non application of guidance.


Thank you and have a nice holiday.

________________________________________________
Terry A. Martin
VOILA Technology, Inc.  -- President
54 Castle Road
Rochester, NY 14623
Phone:  (585) 321-1451 *** NEW AREA CODE IS 585 ***
FAX:  (585) 321-1451
URL:  www.webstitute.net
Email:  [log in to unmask]
________________________________________________