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Re: How is PDF accessibility evaluated?

for

From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Feb 9, 2015 6:26AM

Dona,

I am guessing they really meant to say is to keep it blank. People, I found would type null, or put a space into the box. They probably did "" because in HTML you do alt="" to tell assistive technology to ignore it. I am guessing that this connection was not made in that presentation. There is no way to mark an image as null in MS Office products. The current practice we use at work is to leave the description field empty. Assistive tech will say "image" when encountering it, but that's all. If you do a file > save as > PDF, the built in checker in Acrobat will flag it as an image with no alt, so you need to tag it as an artifact. Now if you use something like CommonLook Office to create the PDF, you can tell it to make the image an artifact when you convert it. The behavior remains the same as I mentioned above in the word doc.

--
Ryan E. Benson
Sent from my iPad

> On Feb 8, 2015, at 11:39, Dona Patrick < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Feb 7, 2015 at 2:34 PM, Chagnon | PubCom < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>>
>> 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!
>
>
> Bevi--
>
> I went to a training for HHS/ACF employees and folks that do consulting
> work for them. The presenters (not HHS/ACF employees) said to use "" in the
> Alt text area of the Format Picture dialog box in Word (or PowerPoint and
> probably Excel) and that when it was converted to a PDF file it would be
> ignored by screen readers. They were wrong -- I tried it and both NVDA and
> JAWS read it as "quote quote". (Same goes for Word. It is read as "quote
> quote".)
>
> Dona
> > >