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Re: PowerPoint accessibility-alt question

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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Apr 25, 2014 9:01AM

Michelle,

> You struck gold with the statement of "Do users know how to author for accessibility.". In the agency in which I work as in others I imagine, is where much of the problem begins.
>
> Recently, there was a "Resource " event and I was sitting at the Section 508 table. One employee became indignant and rather nasty when we tried to inform her about 508. She left in a huff. That's problematic for what we do.


Many people are very sensitive to the suggestion that they don’t know how to (properly) work with a tool they use everyday.

I think the right approach in this context (to the extent possible) is to present the discussion along the lines of: “Cool tricks to make writing more fun and productive” rather than accessibility per se.

Instead of implying that users “don’t know how” to deal with headings (for example), it’s much easier to present heading styles as a cool way to…

- Manage the look and feel of all headings at once, throughout the document
- Create a Table of Contents
- Help with navigation (via the Document Map panel in MS Word)

and so on.

If the subject is approached as: “We’re going to teach you how to write in a way that others can read” the result is usually… unfortunate.

Duff.