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Re: Use of Headings

for

From: Simius Puer
Date: Jul 28, 2010 2:39AM

Several major problems I can see:

1. You are getting someone unskilled in authoring for the web to create
the content. Content authors either need to be educated in applying
semantic structure to their documents, or the conversion of the material
should be left to someone in the web team.

2. By auto converting from Word to PDF with a source document that has no
accessibility (I'm guessing as tables are used for layout that other
structures are also missing - heading etc) you are ending up with an
inaccessible PDF. The simple rule of rubbish in - rubbish out (talking
about the quality of the mark-up/tagging, not the actual content).

3. Whilst PDFs *can be* a million times more accessible than they used to
be (if created properly), they still don't provide the best medium for
delivering Web content. There are plenty of discussions on that in the
archives of this discussion list...

My suggestion would be to re-consider why you are using PDF to publish what
sounds like Web content (as distinct from a document you simply wish to
share over the Internet) in the first place. Most of the reasons people
give for this are a little misled (I need people to be able to print it
etc...) and other reasons like SEO have not even been considered.

If you have a genuine requiremtn to publish in PDF then to get accessible
PDFs you need to either:

1. educate your content creators into applying semantic markup and also
applying post-conversion QA *and *cleaning up any tag soup/apply missing
mark-up

2. have someone apply mark-up to the document professionally either pre
or post conversion...there are pros and cons to both approaches but both are
pretty labor intensive.