WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: PowerPoint accessibility-alt question

for

From: Lisa Snider
Date: Apr 25, 2014 7:32AM


Thanks everyone, this has been a great discussion.

What strikes me as I read this thread is that I see huge technological
advances on Twitter almost every day now. They involve helping people
navigate the physical space, or are computer oriented (hardware,
peripherals, etc.). This is the most sustained and profound growth that I
have seen in the last 15 years, which is wonderful.

However, I am surprised at how far behind we are in terms of PDFs, and
things we have talked about in this thread. There is no reason for it
today, and okay you could also say that there was no reason for it 15 years
ago either. We are talking huge companies, not start ups...

Although I guess the same can be said for websites too. Some days I am
amazed that we are still talking about the same things we talked about in
99...

Just my 2 cents for a Friday morning!

Cheers

Lisa




On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 6:57 AM, Greg Kraus < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> On the issue of LibreOffice and OpenOffice on OS X for creating tagged
> PDFs, I had actually just written this blog post concerning the
> subject, at least for word processing documents.
>
>
> http://accessibility.oit.ncsu.edu/blog/2014/04/18/the-pain-of-accessible-pdfs-from-ms-word-on-mac-test-results/
>
> This specifically looked at the workflow of starting with MS Word for
> OS X and how to make an accessible PDF. There are limitations to this
> workflow, but it highlights some of the issues on OS X.
>
> One takeaway from this is if you use LibreOffice or OpenOffice for
> word processing, alternative text must go in the title field, not the
> description field, if you want that text to pass through to the tagged
> PDF. This is different than what you must do with MS Word on Windows.
>
> Greg
>
> --
> Greg Kraus
> University IT Accessibility Coordinator
> NC State University
> 919.513.4087
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
> http://go.ncsu.edu/itaccess
>
>
> >>> As for making accessible PDF documents with the Mac OSX, the last
> >>> time I checked, the only way was with LibreOffice (and perhaps
> >>> OpenOffice). You can make an accessible word publisher document and
> >>> save it as a PDF and it would retain the proper tagging. Honestly, I
> >>> haven't checked that for several years, but I would assume it still
> > works.
> >>
> >> It does. OpenOffice will create a tagged PDF on the Mac. I just checked
> /
> > confirmed.
> >>
> > > >



--
Lisa Snider
Electronic Records Archivist
Harry Ransom Center
The University of Texas at Austin
P.O. Box 7219
Austin, Texas 78713-7219
P: 512-232-4616
www.hrc.utexas.edu