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Re: Adding abbreviations in Acrobat 8

for

From: John E. Brandt
Date: Apr 23, 2008 3:40PM


Thank you, Keith for saying this. I have had the same experience with Adobe
Acrobat Professional. I wrote about my experiences in some articles about
accessible documents http://www.mainecite.org/awd/accdocs/article3.html

And, Dan...I think you are safe if you use the procedure of
describing/detailing in the text what the abbreviation means when it is
first used in the document. For example, "Mary was working with a team of
teachers implementing Response to Intervention (RTI) techniques..." This is
one of the methods allowed by WGAG 2.0
http://www.w3.org/TR/2007/WD-WCAG20-TECHS-20071211/G97.html . This is also
the method used in Chicago Manual of Style and American Psychological
Association (APA) style Publication Manual. The exception are with commonly
used abbreviations and acronyms (e.g., IBM, AIDS).

~j

John E. Brandt
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Keith Parks
Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 3:37 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Adding abbreviations in Acrobat 8


On Apr 23, 2008, at 6:31 AM, Dan Conley wrote:
> Hi, I just recently got Acrobat 8 pro so that I could make PDFs of
> articles that my institution is publishing. We're very committed to
> accessibility, so I've been doing my best to prepare the documents in
> Word and so on before converting.
> [snip]
>
> It's frustrating, because I know what to do but it's not working. Has
> anyone else encountered this problem, or know what I may be doing
> wrong?
>

Dan,

I can't tell you what you might be doing wrong, but I too have found
Acrobat 8's accessibility touch-up tools to be very inconsistent and
hard to work with. Haven't tried adding abbreviation ALT text, but
other seemingly simple tasks (image ALTs, reading order touch-up)
have proven to be very frustrating, with the same results of changes
and attributes applied but then not "sticking" when I went back and
inspected my changes.

Either the program is actually buggy, and simply does not function as
described, or possibly the interface is just extremely *picky* in how
the various windows, tools and controls work, and I'm not operating
them properly. But for me at least, fixing accessibility in Acrobat
has been MUCH harder that it ought to be, given the functionality
that at least in theory is part of the software.

******************************
Keith Parks
Graphic Designer/Web Designer
Student Affairs Communications Services
San Diego State University
San Diego, CA 92182-7444
(619) 594-1046
mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED>
http://www.sa.sdsu.edu/communications

http://kparks.deviantart.com/gallery
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