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Re: Accessibility Checker - Office 2016 for Mac

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From: Whitney Quesenbery
Date: Aug 26, 2016 2:34PM

Karen, It hasn't been my experience that it works just fine.

The checker works beautifully - so we know that they know how to read their
own files and can tell if they have the accessiblity features needed.

But as happy as I am to see the first steps being taken, testing it out has
been really disappointing. Until I got support from the Microsoft team, all
I could produce were untagged documents. It turned out that:

1. You have to remove all Asian fonts and right-to-left from your MAC OS
System Preferences (!), and you have to remove any right-to-left keyboards.

2. You have to choose the "not as good for printing, and uses our online
service"

3. The online service did take a relatively simple file and create civil
tagging, but my font disappeared, so it changed the pagination.

The first is just silly. It's 2016. I work on a global UX magazine with
translations. The election officials I work with are legally required so
support language - from NY to CA, this often includes Asian languages.

And where is the documentation or warnings?

The second is insane. It means that I can't use this for any sensitive or
private documents. I have no idea what ownership they might assert over
them, or what happens to them on their server.

And where is the documentation? (There is a warning)

The third makes this useless. First, because it's 2016 and we've been using
fonts since about 1990. Second, because it what I want is a file that I can
use to print from, and then post for online access, it means that each and
every single file has to be created twice. My fonts aren't "custom" - they
just aren't part of the Microsoft set.

Where is the list of acceptable fonts?

That might not sound so bad until you think about a context in which even a
small county might produce 85-100 variations of a voter guide (based on
districting), that the material legally has to be the same, and has to be
completed in a very very short calendar window.

I applaud the baby step.

I don't think it's right that this is so flawed and being loosed on the
world without warnings (I got it out of the box when I purchased the update
to 2016).

I'm glad I was just testing, or I'd have been tearing my hair out trying to
figure out why it didn't work.

I'd like to know what the schedule is for bringing this up to the same
standard as the PDF output for Windows.

Whitney


On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 11:21 AM Karlen Communications <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> I don't know. I don't use custom fonts.
>
> Cheers, Karen
>
>