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Re: LongDesc for documents, not websites

for

From: Angela French
Date: Apr 20, 2011 9:03AM

Bev -
I would be inclined to put the long description at the back of the document as you described but without duplicating the graphic again. If the first appearance of the graphic has a Figure number, then I would just put the figure number at the end similar to a footnote. I would also put a link from the foot note back to the graphic to make returning to the place left off easier. Any reason why you feel the graphic must appear again?

Angela French





link to the back where the detailed narrative is located.

Example:
Main body of the document <Figure>
Pie chart shows growth of x-y during 2010. <live link to the back page>Text description of this chart is at the end of this document.

There are two significant drawbacks to this method:

1) It's very time consuming and impractical to construct this, especially given the immense number of revisions that a government document goes through before it is finalized. The live text links will eventually get out of whack during the normal editing and revision process.

2) In these graphic-intensive documents, it could easily add a hundred or more pages to the document because the graphics will appear twice, once in the main body of the text and again in the back section with the detailed description.

Any suggestions? Remember, these are Word and PDF documents, not websites.
Thanks in advance for your words of wisdom!

--Bevi Chagnon

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