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Re: JWAS and special characters pronunciation

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Jan 2, 2014 10:48PM

Olaf wrote: "this is not how most people create documents... Then it's up to
the tool that saves out the HTML or PDF or . to get the tags right... It's
only a few developers who have to get the coding right, not the actual
user."

You're right. Most writers, editors, and other content creators aren't
tagging their documents.

But they should.

The publishing workflow is adapting to new technologies and accessibility
can - and should - meld with it. In large enterprises such as government
agencies and corporations, school systems, and publishers, they're working
toward a multi-channel publishing model where a PDF, HTML webpage, and an
EPUB are generated from the same content. Automated content management
systems are becoming the norm.

Think of this as homogenization of communication across all media, including
accessibility and tags.

To make this work, writers and designers have to learn the basics of tagging
and understand that when they use the Heading 1 formatting style in MS Word,
it will generate an H1 tag in HTML, PDF, and EPUB.

They also need to do a basic check of the exported PDF and EPUB file to
ensure that at least the basic tags are correct. And they need to check and
fix their PDFs. OK, leave the hard complicated stuff to accessibility
experts, but designating that the Greek letter alpha be voiced as alpha and
not ah should be done by the writer with a tool or tag or whatever in MS
Word, while they're writing the document.

Because we don't have good enough tools and we use a backwards workflow,
these organizations end up with thousands of documents waiting for the
accessibility experts to correct. One of my large clients has a backlog of
over a year's worth of documents waiting to be made accessible. Some of
their documents take 2-3 days to correct. Some documents require that the
accessibility expert recreate it to correct the bozo junk the creator did to
it.

And the labor costs have the company wondering if all that money is worth
it. The agency they work for is looking into using the undue burden loophole
in Section 508.

Is this what we want for accessibility?
Stalemate and not progress?
Barriers rather than open doors?

Right now the company is posting non-accessible versions with a notice that
the accessible versions will be available "soon." Read "soon" as "one year."
That means that AT users won't have full access to that information until a
year after everyone else does. This is a mindboggling backlog of documents
waiting to be made accessible. And I find it everywhere, not just this one
client I used as an example.

Accessibility requires much more than the PDF tool to get the tags right
when the PDF is exported from MS Office and InDesign.

Whoever creates the original source document needs to create a good quality,
correctly styled, formatted document. These tasks can't be left for the
coders and accessibility specialists. It's too late in the workflow. (Karen
McCall and others, feel free to chime in!)

So not only do MS Office and InDesign need to give writers and designers the
tools to create a decent source document, but document creators need to take
responsibility for making them accessible, at least for the basics.

Olaf, we have to find a better way to get the job done.
What we have now isn't working, it's still shutting out the majority of
information from AT users and that's not acceptable for me.

-Bevi Chagnon
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