Category: Geeks r Us
I have a client who is taking a course and needs to design a web site and who does not know HTML. Is dream weaver or any other app like it acessible to Jaws? Thanks.
Hi Willie,
I don't use DreamWever myself. I use Drupal for content management. When I used DreamWever version 8 a few years ago, it was Jaws friendly with no scripts. Let me do some research to see if DreamWever CS5 by Adobe is the same.
Update
I found the following link for Adobe Dreamweaver CS 5.5 and accessibility. It goes into many details about the setup of the application to make it as screen reader friendly as possible. It also goes into designing accessible sites. Hope this helps.
https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/dreamweaver/
Thanks so very much. I passed the info on dream weaver and drupal to the client. Not being a web designer can you tell me what the difference in using Drupal verses Dream weaver is? These are the things that make the zone a wonderful place to visit. Thanks.
Hi Willie,
The main difference is that Drupal requires MySQL and PHP 5. It is a content management system that does most of the html code for you. All but alt tags for images, videos etc. Dreamweaver on the other hand is just for creating html pages. Drupal takes sometime to learn, if your friend needs a small site for a class project, they should use Dreamweaver. If it is site that will be visible to the public, I'd say have them learn Drupal. I'll give you a direct link to the documentation, it does a much better job of explaining Drupal that I have just done.
http://drupal.org/documentation
Great! thanks.
Dreamweaver is not really accessible i.e. it will not read a heading if you create a heading in the editor.
Similarly it will not really display lists etc.
The keyboard shortcuts for doing these things work just fine, but you need to look at the underlying html view to verify that things, indeed, worked.
I have reported this to Adobe and complained.
This is the same situation as with Sharepoint Designer.
So, if your client knows html he/she can do this just fine.
If not, this is a bit of a problem.
-B
Do you have a recommendation for an alternative tool? Thanks.
Dream Weaver is some what accessible but it can be a pain to work with some times. It doesn't tell you when there is a heading or what the content is that you are programming. you have to physically look at the website while your editting. I know people have editted code in notepad, and then uploaded it to websites, where I think dream weaver does some of the coding for you, if I remember correctly. there is a free web host called webs.com that is pretty accessible. It can generate html code audomatically if you do not know html programming, or if you are an advance html user, you can add in code manually yourself.
No great tool no. DreamWeaver is not bad. You can do basic web design in it, though you have to manually check the html for accuracy. I have been looking for something better for some time, so far without success. I am pressing adobe to write Jaws scripts to help with the UI of DreamWeaver, I am sure it is easy to script Jaws to recognize headings, lists, and other UI elements in the editor, they must be indicated visually to sighted users.
I will let you know if I have any success. I use tmostly Visual Studio and handcode a lot of the html and Javascript, so I am not sure what to recommend for a beginner who wants an accessible GUI.
I have heard that Wordpress is actually very accessible to create a page with, and I have recommendations how to do it as a screen reader user.
If this is an option I can post a link to the instructions.
I'll take the link thanks.
Try this:
http://ecodelphinus.com/2012/01/07/accessibility-and-wordpress/
This is probably the way I would go for this one, unless someone has something better.
Excellent thanks.