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Re: Something About Formatting Word Docs Feels Wrong For Whatever Reason

for

From: L Snider
Date: Apr 24, 2019 6:51AM

Thanks Jonathan for sharing that, it is good to hear about difference
experiences. In my experience, 90% of the documents I see either have
really wrong headings or in most, no headings at all, so there is
still a long road ahead, even though we have traveled so far.

Karen, I am really curious...If I have read what you wrote accurately,
it sounds like you treat Word documents very differently from PDFs,
web pages, EPUBs, etc. Do you see them as being completely different
in this respect of headings, title and subtitle? if so, I am really
curious why? I know what you said about PDF, and that you would use
the title there if it existed, but I doubt we will get that any time
soon...So do you change your PDF titles and subtitles to headings? I
am just curious why the difference with Word documents specifically? I
ask because in my experience, except for internal document use, I find
public documents are made into PDFs most of the time so the Word stays
internal.

Oh legislation and standards, that is a whole other kettle of fish and
it gets very smelly...

Cheers

Lisa

On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 6:53 AM Karlen Communications
< <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> So what we are trying to balance is good document design versus how the design of a document is accessed/used to provide the visual representation of the content.
>
> I know people who use adaptive technology who will not "accept" documents with tables as they don't like them. I also know people who use adaptive technology who don't want headings, just text with asterisks next to them to indicate a heading/topic change.
>
> We also have to balance accessible document design with falling into the trap of creating differently accessible content based on preference as opposed to accessibility.
>
> With headings, it is the relationship between the various topics that outline the structure of the content/document. I still maintain that the title of a document by its nature has a different look and feel than headings in the document. I agree that in the PDF standards we need a <Title> Tag...but, we are having enough problems keeping some of the existing Tags with the next release of PDF/UA so our voices will go unnoticed and unheard. I also want a <Subtitle> Tag, I want <Index> Tags with Index Item Tags...but we won't get any of those.
>
> As document authors and document remediators, we have to keep focused on good document design which as it turns out, is accessible document design. As someone who uses a screen reader, I have yet to come across problems in accessing and finding content when a document is created to be accessible. Wait, I stand corrected! Since 2003 I've been asking the developers of the JAWS screen reader to support headings created based on existing headings. JAWS does recognize them when you are navigating through the document (sometimes) but not necessarily when you get a list of headings in a Word document. Does this mean that as a document author I don't use this tool to create more accessible documents? No. I can't create documents based on the shortcomings and unresponsiveness of an adaptive technology developer to support something that should just be supported OR adhere to a standard with equal shortcomings. We also have the instances where one version of a screen reader will read Alt text for images while another version of the same screen reader won't. Our focus is on good document design.
>
> We really need to get a group together to move our accessible document design best practices for at least word processed and presentation documents into a standard that can be followed and adopted as part of legislation and treaty.
>
> Cheers, Karen
>
>