Reply received Tuesday, 28th January:
Having worked for two years in Botswana, I can relate to some of Mike Holderness' concerns.
It is possible to retrive a lot of information with only an email connection (which is what we had in Botswana). One of the best guides is by 'Dr' Bob Rankin:
http://www.activesol.com/www/dbobfram.htm Accessing The Internet By E-Mail Doctor Bob's Guide to Offline Internet Access 6th Edition - January 1997
Roddy MacLeod R.A.MacLeod@hw.ac.uk
Reply received Wednesday, 12th February 1997:
Your article reminds me of some work I did for a Commonwealth IT group. From the group I learnt that, although universities in Zimbabwe had access to the Web, they had to pay for their connection time. They were willing to pay for the useful information, but didn't want to use their budget for accessing logos and gratuitous graphics. I also learnt that the telephone company in many developing companies is often owned by a multinational company such as AT&T - so accessing the University home page with its ornate logo and photo and sound clip of the VC results in hard currency moving from the developing country to a multinational!
You may be interested that a goal of the W3C is universal access to resources. W3C have prepared a briefing paper on their work on access for people with disabilities. See http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Disabilities/ for further information.
Brian Kelly UK Web Focus Officer B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
Material on this page is copyright Ariadne/original authors. This page last updated on January 30th 1997