[MACCAWS] Been to an accessibility seminar

I've been to a seminar today organised by the RNIB (Royal National 
Institute of the Blind) on Web Accessibility. The event was paid for by 
Adobe, who presented GoLive 6 and Acrobat made accessible.

Apart from GoLive not being native for XHTML 1.1 and can't be made to be, 
no mention was made of web standards being the key to starting to write 
accessible websites.

I challenged the Adobe guy why, and he said that they'd assumed that people 
were writing in Web Standard compliant mode. However their idea of web 
standards differs from mine.

The RNIB girl also didn't know about webstandards.org or anything else that 
we're all trying to do here  I've of course enlightened her.

So what did I get out of it to pass on?

For information, not a lot, although I'll make available all the stuff I do 
get (legally  we can use what we like). What came home was that the average 
(read vast majority of) web developer knows little about standards, and 
unless they start caring their websites are not going to be accessible. I 
think that we need to emphasise that lack of accessibility =  biggish legal 
trouble and that the best way to get accessibility is to go for standards.

I'm passing all the info I've gathered to the RNIB and they're going to 
distribute it to the people who attended the seminars  there's been nine of 
them  about 900 people  and this info includes MACCAWS, so we may get some 
feedback.

I'll be formulating some suggestions for the relevant targetting committee 
whe I get more feedback from the people I met

Regards

john