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Track Changes - Best Practices for showing document revisions in Word, PDF, and HTML?

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From: Philip Kiff
Date: Jan 15, 2018 1:28PM

I have a Word document that proposes a small set of changes to a set of
regulations. The document uses strikeout and redlining (red coloured)
fonts to indicate deletions and insertions. I'm trying to figure out the
simplest, most accessible way of turning this document into an
accessible Word file, and then probably also an accessible PDF and web page.

I see there have been some discussions around this before on WebAIM:

Track Changes (mainly about using MS Word):
https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?threadI27

And a couple threads on Strikethrough Text:
https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?threadD64
https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?threadX09

From these threads, I gather that using MS Word's Track Changes feature
can produce Word documents that are pretty accessible (though you'll
want to darken the choice of red colour used, I think).

But for PDF, is there really a good option like Track Changes in Word?
And for HTML, is using ins and del tags good enough, or should I be
inserting visual markers in the text - prefixes or brackets or...?

I foresee receiving more of these documents in the future, and I'm
leaning towards trying to get this government office to rewrite the list
of text changes by peppering the document with visual "Inserted:" and
"Deleted:" text markers. And then possibly also including complete
"Original" and "Final (After Changes)" versions. And maybe even
including a redline/strikeout version as a redundant third copy. But
that all seems so cumbersome to me.

Does anyone have better, simpler solutions? Or samples of good documents
showing versioning (especially in PDF) that I can look at?

Phil.

Philip Kiff
D4K Communications