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Re: PowerPoint accessibility-alt question

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From: Clark, Michelle - NRCS, Washington, DC
Date: Apr 25, 2014 9:36AM

Duff,

Thanks for your comments and I agree with them. This woman was resistant after she asked if the documents she sent in emails had to be accessible and was told "yes". That's usually where I get most of my problem documents. Indeed, some need to be stroked. into it but lack of training and constant upgrades add to the problem.

We are preparing to upgrade to Microsoft 2013. With what I expect to get along the lines of training, my stuff may look a little crazy for a while as well.

Michelle

Michelle

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Duff Johnson
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2014 11:02 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PowerPoint accessibility-alt question

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.
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