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Re: How is PDF accessibility evaluated?

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From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Feb 7, 2015 12:34PM

Karen wrote: "I was at a webinar this past week and was gobsmacked to hear them recommend as a standard/guideline/best practice/requirement that tables be used for design layout in Word, that text boxes be used in Word instead of formatted styles and that the null attribute be used for decorative images in Word documents."

Karen, thanks so much for your review of the Access Board's webinar last week.

I am shocked, no, make that gobsmacked, to hear this. Using tables for page layout is extremely shortsighted because not only is it highly unlikely that tables will provide accessibility in both Word and the PDF, but they foul up the entire publishing workflow.

Roughly 75% of government Word documents (looking at US federal documents) are exported to some other format. So, what starts in Word, ends up in one or more of the following formats:

1) PDF for websites and electronic distribution.
2) PDF for press, which has a very different set of technical requirements.
3) Imported into Adobe InDesign or another desktop publishing program for highly-designed layout.
4) Exported into an ePUB/eBook format.
5) Converted to XML, HTML, and other mark-up languages for use in websites, streaming, feeds, and other dynamic content.
6) Stored in a content management system (CMS).

If a Word document contains tables for layout, then the folks creating numbers 3 through 6 are S O L (translation, "sheet" out of luck).

This is not the way to get standards adopted. No one with experience in any facet of publishing and communications will start using tables for page layout in Word because doing so will cost them their job. I'll be kind and just say that whoever developed that recommendation had only a very narrow understanding of what happens to content and data in the real world of communications.

And re: the null attribute for graphics in Word...Is this even possible to do? Having been a Word expert since version 1 for DOS, I haven't seen this feature yet in MS Word. If I'm wrong, please let me and others know!

Gobsmacked. Thanks Karen for bringing back fond memories of a British colleague who used it daily. Translation, it's a lovely British-ism for astounding...to the n-th degree!

--Bevi Chagnon