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PDFs and Accessibility

Thursday, 10 September 2009

Donal J. Rice wrote: > > Start with publishing these in an accessible, structured format. > > This will help identify the technical (such as authoring tools) and > > organisational issues that need to be overcome and dealt withregards to > > the publication process itself. To break this down, how about something like this: Employ accessibility experts to create MS Word template(s), an author's guide and a format conversion guide. Regularly produced document types (e.g. planning decision reports or regional managementplans) can have their own template. There can also be generic templates for things like application forms and miscellaneous documents. These templates should define appropriate heading styles and contain placeholder examples of different content types, such as an image, a data table, a graph, a map or an interactive form. These examples will, as far as is possible in MS Word, be accessible. For each content type, the author's guide should explain the accessibility issues, authoring best practice and the limitations of MS Word. The format conversion guide should explain how to convert the MS Word document into HTML, tagged PDF and possibly other formats. It should outline the conversion procedure describing how to retain the accessibility information that is already in the document and how to create the required information where it is missing (e.g. adding the data table markup that is not possible in MS Word). The organisation's staff should receive training and ongoing mentoring in the understanding and use of these tools and guides. The organisation should develop a suitable editorial structure and publishing procedures to ensure quality.