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Re: Character limit on alt-text in PDF?

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From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Jul 1, 2013 9:08AM


Based on observations made in a number of seminars on accessible PDFs I have done in the last months it became very clear to me that getting accessibility right is cheapest when as much as possible can be done on the editorial level (whether that's for online content or PDFs). A good strategy is always: if you have content that would be presented with lots of visuals but without text just add the respective text somewhere else. As long as content is distributed electronically there is always enough space!

For example - if you have some business graphics, just grab that Excel spreadsheet, and insert it as a table next to the business graphic (or if that's not an option, in the appendix); then point to it (or in the case of the annex, link to it), and all you need to add as alternate text/description is a pointer to the text based version of the data.


Olaf


On 1 Jul 2013, at 16:28, McMorland, Gabriel wrote:

> We sometimes need long descriptions to describe complex diagrams, flowcharts, or maps.
>
> I'm not running into a technical character limit, but I'm interested in design choices others have made.
>
>