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Re: accessible word-wrap in word?

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Sep 19, 2016 5:44AM

Vanessa, regarding floating images and accessibility - this may be a situation where converting to PDF for publication would be more accessible to some users. Word has limitations and the only other option might be to provide alternatives to the images elsewhere in the document - but this is difficult and might add to the word count as well.

Jonathan

Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 19, 2016, at 7:05 AM, Preast, Vanessa < <EMAIL REMOVED> <mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> >> wrote:

Not sure I understand the question, so I'll just describe further, and hopefully I'm hitting what you're asking for.

Faculty write grants and submit publications using Word, typically. I assume these files are going to an editor who actually formats them for final publication in journals, etc. These publications usually come along with certain style requirements, including number of pages. Thus, some faculty members use word-wrapping to ensure that their proposal does not exceed the page limit. However, these faculty members have also discovered that not only are the floating images/textboxes not accessible in Word, but they also might cause the images to reposition themselves in unexpected ways. The faculty are mostly concerned about the latter issue, but I'm hoping there is an accessible solution that takes care of both issues.

I can check with the faculty, but I'm seriously doubting that they'd want to learn some publishing software. All our faculty have Word and most faculty have at least basic word processing skills. Thus, I suspect that the faculty would be more willing to incorporate a few accessibility-related processes when making Word documents than to learn a whole new software system. (A new system could be so much of a barrier that they might want to give up on the accessibility initiatives.)

Best,
Vanessa