Auditing for nurses
Friday, 21 August 2009
We're doing an audit for the National Council for the Professional Development of Nursing and Midwifery. The interesting thing about auditing this site is that almost all of the information (probably close to 99%) is contained in PDF and MS Word documents, not HTML. These documents include all the standard content types - structured text, complex images, data tables, even application forms that have to be made accessible using mark-up. So the biggest issues are around the extent to which the PDF and DOC formats are accessibility supported for these types of content and allow these types of content to be presented in ways that users' assistive technologies can read and interact with.
This is such an important issue in Web accessibility, which tends to revolve around HTML accessibility. Making HTML pages accessible is great, but what if all the information is held in potentially inaccessible other formats? Food for thought.