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Re: automatic document testing

for

From: Ted
Date: Oct 26, 2011 2:06AM

Hi Lucy

The bad news is that the tool you are looking for is called an "attitude
adjuster", more on which below, but first .

The good news is that making a PDF accessible (at least to some level) can
be relatively straightforward.

Firstly, if you are dealing with scanned documents, which are effectively
just pictures of text, you will need to convert them to actual text. Acrobat
Professional does a pretty good job of this these days, via OCR (Optical
Character Recognition).

You will then need to add some structure. How much depends on a number of
factors including: the nature of the content, how long the document is and
how accessible you want it to be.

To give you an idea of the amount of work involved, I recently did a similar
job, making a 750 page book as accessible as possible for a blind academic.
It took a (long) day to apply a basic tag structure, to mark up paragraphs
and, crucially, add a heading structure. This made the book readable but
certainly not fully accessible. This is because, among other things, most
chapters had data tables and charts.

Retrospectively making all of these accessible for a book of this length
would have bee an enormous job (as it would be in any format, including
HTML), but the key word here is retrospectively. The long run aim has to be
to get content authors to add accessibility features at source, simply
because it is so much more efficient to do so than it is to fix documents
after the fact.

Finally, back to the attitude adjuster. Here in the UK, in the absence of
any relevant prosecution under either the Disability Discrimination Act or
the Equality Act, I'm afraid there is no off the shelf, ready to go attitude
adjuster that I know of. You will probably have to generate your own. When
programming it I would suggest that, at a minimum, it includes modules for:

- modern, professional document production techniques absolutely require it
- it's the law
- it can actually be quicker, cheaper and easier to do than not
- it is profoundly, morally the right thing to do

Good luck.

Ted Page
Director, PWS Ltd
www.pws-ltd.com

Registered in England no. 06508410.
Registered office: 4 Riverview, Walnut Tree Close, Guildford, Surrey GU1 4UX