WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

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


-----Original Message-----
From: Lucy Greco [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: 24 October 2011 19:54
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] automatic document testing


Hi:
This is meant to be steps used while moving forward. I have been asked to
give a three or four step process to make sure readings for students are
accessible basically it's a set of instructions I am to give to faculty to
assure that the documents they put online e are accessible. These documents
might be scanned articles library readings exerts from books and so on. I
have been told that it cannot be more than three or four steps so that it
would not be intimidating and that talking about structure and tagging is
getting to technical. I am at a loss really because what I think I am being
asked to say is that providing the text is all that is needed. And I really
don't want to say that. One of the other things I was asked was if there was
a way to flag a potential problem document on the way to it being uploaded.
I am really frustrated on this process I know access is not extraordinarily
hard but three or four steps is not enough ether. At least I am not looking
at making forms in this project. I have to have the documents be usable by
a highly intelligent group. but I have also been told that the faculty don't
want steps that will take more than a few minutes to do.


Lucy Greco
Assistive Technology Specialist
Disabled Student's Program UC Berkeley
(510) 643-7591
http://attlc.berkeley.edu
http://webaccess.berkeley.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Duff Johnson
Sent: Monday, October 24, 2011 11:30 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] automatic document testing

Lucy,

Can you say a little more about precisely who are the users who are trying
to make these documents more accessible? Are they... the authors? The people
running scanners? The web-content administrators? Who?

Also, are we talking about one specific body of existing documents that just
has to be fixed, or are we talking in more general terms about how to
improve the process of creating new documents, or... what?

Duff.

On Oct 24, 2011, at 2:25 PM, Lucy Greco wrote:

> Yes I actually gave these instructions but once again I was told to
> complicated
>
> Lucy Greco
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Mark
> Guisinger
> Sent: Monday, October 24, 2011 11:21 AM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] automatic document testing
>
> Lucy,
> Did you try the built in accessibility checking tools in Adobe Acrobat
> Pro 9 and above? I find them easy to use and it does provide some
> suggestions on how to correct the issues. You will find them under the
Advanced menu.
>
> MarkG
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Lucy Greco < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> To: "WebAIM Discussion List ( <EMAIL REMOVED> )"
> < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Sent: Mon, October 24, 2011 2:04:12 PM
> Subject: [WebAIM] automatic document testing
>
> Hello:
> I have been given the task of helping users provide accessible
> documents. The more I tell my director that the task of providing
> accessible documents is not an easy three step process the more he
> wants a simple way to check the accessibility of documents and quick fix.
Does anyone have a tool that will
> check PDF files and indicate if the document is accessible. And if it is
not
> accessible what to fix in it. I tried the web aim instructions on how
> to create accessible files but was told they were too complicated.
> Someone please help me find a way to give a simple answer to a hard
> problem thanks Lucy