Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC digital curriculum service in England

[Alex Hudson]

On Thu, 2004-10-14 at 12:30 +0100, Lee Braiden wrote:
> I wonder if that matters?  It's all well and good to support a 98%
> majority of the population, but if the remaining 1.7% are specific
> groups such as disabled users or people with certain computing
> requirements, that's actual discrimination, rather than providing for
> the vast majority, isn't it?

Well, yes/no. First, you're assuming that the remaining 1.7% are such a
group, I'm not sure that's a fair assumption. Second, what is the better
alternative? We've discussed SMIL+SVG, but that doesn't really seem to
be an immediately practical solution.

It's a bit like the argument for using strict web standards to make
sites accessible. The theory is nice, but it doesn't work that way in
practice - the accessibility technology people use already adapted to th
current "web" way of doing things. So, although a 'pure' HTML site with
CSS layout is theoretically easier to understand, many sites that are
table-driven (for example, the RNIB's site) are just as accessible. 

Of course, I'm not saying that we should aim for technologies which make
accessibility better, I'm just not sure that levelling the accessibility
argument against Flash is either fair or sustainable. In order to
influence the people producing content here, we need simple, strong
arguments and aim for the policy makers, IMO.

> Also, 98.3% does sound high to me, too.

We could argue about the actual install figure. In practice, I don't
think anything has a comparable installed base with a comparable feature
set.

I know I'm probably sounding like a Flash fan in these mails; I don't
mean to, and I don't use it personally. I have nothing against SVG
either - in fact, I use Inkscape (an SVG tool) for all my design work.

The problem is twofold. Firstly, the content creation tool is basically
Flash - there isn't anything else. We can convert from Flash to another
format, but a) the Flash will always be the canonical format (so, we
can't make an argument about accessibility because we cannot improve the
accessibility, for example), b) there really isn't much good reason to
use other systems.

Second, the 'standards' stuff just isn't well supported. SVG has few
players (especially for animation), and the 'big' free software apps
aren't rushing to support it. Moz dropped it. Moz also dropped the MNG
animation format, because the standard was basically massive. They
replaced it with the proprietary APNG format, which required an increase
in the binary of 5k or something but supplied most of the same features.
I guess we do ECMA script well, and if SMIL 2.0 is in Helix, well that's
good too. I think the thing to ask is, why aren't people developing
these tools? I'm assuming there just isn't a big call for them.

Cheers,

Alex.