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Re: automatic document testing

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From: John E Brandt
Date: Oct 26, 2011 8:09PM

Lucy,

Digital documents that eventually end up as a Portable Document Format (PDF)
file are almost always created by some other application (e.g., MS-Office
products, Adobe products, etc.). The issue of making a digital document
accessible is best accomplished at that beginning stage of the development.
The later versions of MS Office have an Accessible Checker built in and will
not only check the document for accessibility, but it will provide easy to
understand directions for making it so. If you then simply "Save as a PDF"
all of the access features *should" come across intro the resulting PDF. But
I emphasize the word "should." That is what the Adobe Acrobat Professional
accessibility checker is for.

I've written a series of short articles about how to make Accessible Office
Documents http://mainecite.org/awd/accdocs.html but I admit most of them
need to be updated (a project I am slowly working on). But a basic premise
of all of the articles is that it is best to work from the source document
rather than trying to fix the PDF.

The other subtle philosophy in the articles is that you should use the right
format of document in the right situation as some documents are simply not
made for sharing in digital form. For example, a newsletter beautifully
compiled in Adobe InDesign and intended to look good print should not be
converted into PDF and distributed. While you can certainly make the
InDesign file into an accessible PDF, why bother. If the point is for folks
to read it on line, just put the content into an attractive web document.

The same philosophy is true for PowerPoint documents. These are intended to
be used in a presentation. If you want to share the content, dump it into an
accessible Word document or into an accessible web page and edit it so it
can be understood and an independent document.

~j

John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
<EMAIL REMOVED>
207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA