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Re: PowerPoint accessibility-alt question

for

From: Athol J Gow
Date: Apr 25, 2014 11:51AM

Dear list members,
On the subject of Mac OS conversion of Word/PowerPoint files to PDFs, we've noticed another problem that is related (I think) to the unicode font issue - i.e., the PDF rendering wants to use unicode font and if it can't find a font set that matches the one in the original document, it substitutes different symbol and letter combinations for some characters in the resultant PDF. This can make some words unintelligible if you're listening to the PDF with a screen reader.
In our experience, it seems to happen most frequently with PDFs that are created on a Mac. We would love to give instructors and faculty members some simple instructions on how to avoid this problem - does anyone has any guidance on which fonts to use and which to avoid when creating MS Office documents on a Mac?
Thanks,
Athol Gow


Athol J. Gow,
Manager, Library Accessibility Services,
University of Guelph Library,
50 Stone Rd.,
Guelph, Ontario
N1G 2W1
Canada
Phone: 519-824-4120 ext. 52312
Fax: 519-836-0435



----- Original Message -----

From: "Michelle Clark - NRCS, Washington, DC" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2014 11:36:22 AM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PowerPoint accessibility-alt question

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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