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Re: Naming and labeling tables in Word

for

From: Whitney Quesenbery
Date: May 28, 2014 12:32PM

Sigh.
I sometimes (often informally) teach groups how to make Office docs
accessible.

The advice seems to come in three groups:

1. The majority is essentially: Use Word as it was intended to make a
correctly formatted document. I find myself saying this over and over
again for structure, styles, lists, columns, headings, etc.

2. There's a small group of "good practice things to do that are important
for screen readers and make the document ready for PDF" This includes
thinks like hyperlinks and tables and setting language.

3. There's an even smaller set of "things you have to change about how you
write" which I think just includes adding alt text, checking
color/contrast, and placing images inline.



My "sigh" list is:

1. If everyone did #1 and #2 as a matter of course, it wouldn't take more
than an inter-office memo to teach the additions for accessibility (#3).

I've even had companies ask me to teach accessible docs as a way to force
people to learn good document structure and plain language, since they
won't show up for those topics.

2. This stuff is so basic that I don't understand why we can't have
consistency across the applications. Please. Please. Please.

Maybe we can stop "innovating" long enough to get simple things right. So
that the screen readers can finally actually learn to read the file
formats. And so that the conversions between formats (Office to PDF and
Office to Web) will work correctly. They are just bugs as far as I can see.

Forget certifying people. Let's have certifications for file formats and
converters.





On Wed, May 28, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Jonathan Avila
< <EMAIL REMOVED> >wrote:

> > 1. Is there any other screen reader that does make of use of these
> semantic hooks Word allows?
>
> You need to make sure the Defined Bookmarked Tables override verbosity
> setting in JAWS is set to "off" for the bookmarks to be announced.
>
> Jonathan
>
>