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Re: Graphical heading & Alt-text

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Jul 15, 2013 2:45PM

Thanks Duff for confirming my workaround.

Duff wrote: "These are very very hard questions for software. When does a
change to visual styling "become" semantically significant?
... I believe (I could be wrong) that today's APIs and AT aren't set up to
address such circumstances at this time."

I don't think this is a problem because most software, like MS Word and HTML
editors, gives the developer the tool to add either Alt-text or Actual text
to the graphic. The developer makes the decision, not the software. To me,
that's correct.

The bigger problem we have with Adobe InDesign is that it lacks the tool to
put Actual text on a graphic.

- It has a tool to pub alt-text on graphics, but not actual text.

- It has a really cool tool to automatically draw the graphic's XMP meta
data information and drop it into the Alt-text field, but not the actual
text metadata.

- It doesn't even have either Alt-text or Actual Text metadata XMP fields,
so the "title" or "description" XMP fields are borrowed. This is a huge
problem for government databases with millions of photos that have already
used the "title" and "description" fields for what they should be used for,
not accessible Alt-text and Actual text. In most cases, the description of a
photo is not the same as its Alt-text.

And with Acrobat, it's built-in accessibility checker will flag a graphic as
an error if it has only Actual text on it, not Alt-text. So expect to see
more PDFs with both Actual and Alt text on the graphics.

Now you know how they came to be! The developer needed to pass the Acrobat
accessibility checker in order to not be fired from his job.

Duff wrote: "... standing on the sidelines throwing peanut shells."
You must be a better person than me, Duff. Sometimes at the end of a long
day dealing with InDesign, Acrobat, and accessibility, I want to throw rocks
at the engineers because of all the hoops they make an ordinary graphic
designer go through in order to create an accessible PDF from a
print-layout. <grin>

-Bevi Chagnon
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