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

for

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Jan 17, 2018 8:43AM

> But I need to find a format that can be distributed by a branch of the
> government here in Ontario, which like many governments, has a general
> policy against distributing MS Word files. I think the policy against
> relying on MS Word documents for public files comes about because it
> is a proprietary format that requires paid software in order to open it.
Just to clarify: yes, of course the government uses Word files all the
time. It just doesn't rely on Word as a format to *distribute* files to
the general public through its website. Documents are in HTML or PDF,
and that's about it.


On 2018-01-17 10:33 AM, Philip Kiff wrote:
> Thanks, Jim. I gather that using the Track Changes feature in Word is
> indeed a good method of showing document changes to most users.
>
> But I need to find a format that can be distributed by a branch of the
> government here in Ontario, which like many governments, has a general
> policy against distributing MS Word files. I think the policy against
> relying on MS Word documents for public files comes about because it
> is a proprietary format that requires paid software in order to open it.
>
> There is considerable time pressure on this project, so today I'm
> proceeding with the creation of PDF versions. I've decided to use
> strikeout to indicate deletions and red underline to indicate
> insertions, and then I'm going to add alternative text to the actual
> lines used as strikeouts and underlines in order to give screen reader
> users a way of figuring out where text changes begin or end. In the
> tag tree I will reorder the figures so their appearance in the reading
> order matches the proper locations where edits begin and end.
>
> This makes the least number of changes to the previously approved
> format that users are accustomed to. And while it continues to use red
> colour, it does not rely on that colour as the only way for a reader
> to identify where edits occur. I am unhappy about the inclusion of
> large chunks of underlined text, which I realize makes it harder for
> all sighted users to read, but I couldn't come up with a better visual
> marker without restructuring the whole document along the lines that I
> suggested in my original post. The possibility of using reversed text
> was explicitly rejected by upper management.
>
> I also considered replacing the actual text edits with identical
> figures using screenshot images of the text, and then applying
> alternative text to those images that repeated the text chunks and
> also added additional notes about whether the text was inserted or
> deleted.
>
> Phil.
>
> On 2018-01-16 1:24 PM, Jim Homme wrote:
>> Hi,
>> This is just my opinion on the PDF question. I'm guessing that the
>> PDF documents originally came from an MS Office program, like Word,
>> for example. If I were doing this, I would mark up the documents
>> using Track Changes in Word. Also, another opinion, based on some
>> experience as a screen reader user, I have had the most success
>> working with Track Changes in Word using NVDA. I have no useable
>> sight. The way I generally work is I turn on Markup, and I'm pretty
>> sure I use simple markup. I look at the changes to get a feel for
>> what the person wants. Then I turn off all markup and make my
>> changes, then turn it back on to pass back to the other
>> collaborators. I endorse working with Office first, because I feel
>> that as a totally blind person, I have much more control over the
>> editorial process, whereas if I did it in Adobe, I would pretty much
>> be useless.
>>
>> Thanks.
>>
>> Jim
>>
>>
>> Jim Homme
>>
>>