Re: Affecting Institutional Change (Yeah Right)
amacater@galactic.demon.co.uk (Andrew M.A. Cater) wrote:
> There is a serious point [about proprietary formats] to be made
> to your college. Archiving, readability, public record. I've only
> been dealing with computers for about 22 years: I've used what
> were then leading word processors - Wordstar 2000, WordPerfect
> 5.1 and 6.0 and Word for DOS. Niche publishing with DTP software
> like early FrameMaker and Ventura Publisher for GEM.
>> <rearrange>
> Governments need reliable 30/50/100 year document retrieval, for
> example, and the oldest regularly consulted legal document source
> in England dates from 1086.
>> </rearrange>
> With the exception of WordPerfect - which seems still to be in
> vogue for American lawyers - the others are effectively gone
> forever.
>> <rearrange>
> If you need a certified copy of your graduation thesis in 5 years
> / college records / assignments - basically anything digital
> which relates to your time at college - you and your college had
> better make sure that it's available in ASCII/PDF/OpenOffice.
>> </rearrange>
Hmm...good point!
> ASCII is an international standard and is universal and
> ubiquitous: .doc is not - hence "forward" compatibility whereby
> Word docs are re-saved into the newer format but not backward
> compatibility to read and generate docs into/from Office 2007
> format on Office 97.
I definitely do encourage the use of text wherever possible (and
this is also in my own interest directly, since that means I have
an easier time using Emacs on it).
> The OpenOffice.org format is now an ISO standard, just like some
> variants of PDF (and possibly Adobe PostScript - though I'm not
> sure on this one). It's documented and will be therefore be
> available pretty much forever. There's enough detail in there to
> reconstruct it from scratch for digital archaeologists if need
> be.
That's good news, at least. I wonder if there are any nice
command-line tools (aside from installing the whole huge system) to
convert OpenOffice documents to text, html, etc.
> [Remember kids, the Microsoft Office Student and Teacher licence
> you have in college expires when you graduate - please uninstall
> all Microsoft college licenced products and purchase full
> versions at $$$ cost or we'll send BSA/FAST after you :) ]
See, yet another reason not to use that in the first place!
> Amy Templeton wrote:
> > On a positive note, I recently did actually get through to
> > someone (next year she plans not to use any .docs on her little
> > area on the school website)!
> I'd have her hide for using .docs anyway - if the documents
> aren't all readable text-only (with a screen reader for the
> blind/visually impaired or any other appropriate technologies for
> those with other impairments), then she ought to consider using
> only plain HTML _anyway_ . No publicly available document should
> mandate the use of a mouse - look at the good web accessibility
> sites - and consider carefully the Americans with Disabilities
> Act (or other appropriate local legislation).
Yeah, I've been trying to point web folks at accessible design
sites (the college is always posturing about its commitment to
accessibility), but they're in love with this horrid "course
management" software called Blackboard that they paid a lot of
money for a few years back (they keep adding more and more of the
website to it, making more and more content inaccessible), which
breaks all text-based browsers I've tried and even breaks various
and sundry Iceweasel extensions that make it keyboard-driven. It
also has tabs, making tabbing through a near-impossibility (and a
lot of the rest of the site uses javascript with no HTML-only
alternative...*sigh*). So the point is she doesn't really have
control over this since she more or less has to use Blackboard, so
it's already too late for her not to mandate mousage (fortunately,
I can jump the mouse around using keybindings in stumpwm (providing
I'm not ripping a backup of some of my music off of a CD or doing
some other resource-intensive task), but unfortunately can't make
it click from the keyboard).
Fortunately, the Office of Accessibility, with whom I've done some
work in the past, is willing to have student workers (among other
things) download things off of these sites and make them
readable/usable for people with physical handicaps. They also do
things like scanning textbooks into screen-reader readable files
and providing student readers for other printed course materials if
they aren't available in some sort of accessible *print* format
(such as large print or braille, though they're working on
braille-ing things up), which is one of the main things I helped
out with. Unfortunately, however, this means that there is already
a "good enough" solution for students with physical handicaps.
So yeah, that's that.
Amy
--
War is an equal opportunity destroyer.
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