University of Georgia web sites can now take advantage of a text transcoder for UGA web pages. In association with the Disability Resource Center and web design experts on campus, EITS has selected and deployed LIFT, a server-based tool from UsableNet Inc., that dynamically generates customizable "text-only" views of Web sites. This moves UGA towards fully accommodating individuals with visual impairments, mobile impairments, and similar challenges regarding equal access and use of UGA Web sites in the same ways as those without these challenges.

Announced to the UGA community in the February 21, 2005 edition of Columns , this software intelligently transcodes web pages "on the fly" effectively eliminating the need to generate, store and maintain text-only versions of the approximately 670,000 web pages currently at UGA.

Designers will only need to add a special link to their pages and the transcoder will do the rest. Then, once somebody chooses that link, all the pages in that site will be trafficked through the text transcoder automatically.

Using the Transcoder with your pages:

To make text-only versions of your pages, simply add a new link to your main page. The link could say, for example, "Text-Only Version", and your URL link code would look like this:

http://text.usg.edu:8080/tt/your_site's_name.uga.edu

Transcoded pages also include a tool section by default, allowing the user to customize the page by changing font size, page colors, and other functions.