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

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From: Karlen Communications
Date: Apr 24, 2019 8:21AM


Yes, I guess I do treat word processed (Word) documents differently. While we don't have access to granular information for characters, words or phrases in PDF, I see no reason not to use them in word processed documents. We also have the "history" of published document guidelines/standards and various Style Guides that provide guidance on the structure of academic content/papers as well as formatting.

PDF come from many sources, word processed documents are only one source. Not every document part in a word processed document maps gracefully to other formats. For example, a Table of Contents for a website appears on every page and every page is only related to the name of the site. Someone (like me) can have a website that evolves over the years to reflect my shifting focus. I still have some legacy content from 2000 on there about basic training for using your adaptive technology. It is still relevant and published in RTF (before we could Tag PDF and needed cross viewability with Macs). In recent years, I've added a page on Inclusion and Inclusive Education. Not really related to education as it encompasses access to education as well as to digital content. Then there was the time (2012) when my municipality was going to eliminate paratransit for which there was another web page. The "flow of content" is not "consistent" and is only related to the "title" of the web site by the fact that this is my website.

Hopefully word processed documents don't represent this constant adding of content that may or may not be related. :-)

EPUB is different in that while you can create an accessible EPUB from a word processed document, there are still parts of a word processed document that are not reflected in the EPUB format.

Word processed documents have their limitations and at some point you, as the document author or content SME determine that you need a more complex layout so move to something like InDesign.

Each application or file type has its own rules, capabilities and tools that may or may not be available in other formats. Whether they are or are not does not limit me as the document author in how content is structured or formatted. And what access to granular information I have or don't have in a file format I convert to does not limit me to using a Style Guide, best practices or parts of a standard when I create content using a word processor...or presentation software.

I go back to when we were first able to Tag PDF documents and people found working in Acrobat cumbersome for documents they were creating at that time. The question was asked of me "is there anything we can do in Word (or native applications) that would lessen the work in Acrobat?" Turns out there was and is. Up until then, almost all training on word processing was based on JiT where as long as it looked the way you wanted it to look, it went out the door. Once we, as a community interested in creating more accessible content, learned what tools we have or should have in word processors, we began to map things to Tags...just as we mapped Section 508 criteria to non-HTML content.

But in the end, if you are working in a word processor, you have tools and capabilities you might not have in other formats like PDF.

I know, rather long answer. :-)

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of L Snider
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2019 8:51 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Something About Formatting Word Docs Feels Wrong For Whatever Reason

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
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of
> Jonathan Avila
> Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 6:44 PM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Something About Formatting Word Docs Feels Wrong
> For Whatever Reason
>
> > I hear your point fully, but anyone I have ever known who has used a screen reader daily has told me that the heading 1 was far more instructive for them.
>
> I would say that knowing the "main heading" is most important. To me it doesn't matter necessarily if it's a 1 or 2 -- but knowing it's an overarching heading -- I always just use H as I find the numbers to move between headings with JAWS to never work as expected. Knowing the headings relationships to others -- equal to, lesser, greater is what's important as well - but again to me that information can be accurate even if a level is missing -- as long as I know it's of lesser hierarchy and feel comfortable that something wasn't missing. So in some ways the level numbers are arbitrary and it's the meaning and relationships communicated that is what is important in my opinion. For me, whether a Word document has multiple h1s and then h2 and h3 is no worse than a document with 1 h1, and then h2s and h3s.
>
> In many situations 1 h1 doesn't make sense because that sections in a document may not be related -- that is if you were to make the title an h1 and the sections h2s it would imply that the h2s were all under the h1 when in fact they may not be related. That is the document can contain unrelated things and there is no heading that is overarching.
>
> Jonathan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On
> Behalf Of L Snider
> Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 6:04 PM
> To: WebAIM Discussion List
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Something About Formatting Word Docs Feels Wrong
> For Whatever Reason
>
> CAUTION: This email originated from outside of the organization. Do not click links or open attachments unless you recognize the sender and know the content is safe.
>
>
> I hear your point fully, but anyone I have ever known who has used a screen reader daily has told me that the heading 1 was far more instructive for them. I know that everyone has different experiences, so this can change what one person does and why...Also PDF/UA-2 won't likely adhere to heading levels, and I do not agree at all with that one at all. So standards can be interesting...
>
> Cheers
>
> Lisa
>
> On Tue, Apr 23, 2019 at 4:12 PM Karlen Communications < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> >
> > But the title of a document should look different from headings in the document. We need the Title Style to be able to do that or we would be creating it.
> >
> > We need to ask ourselves if we are creating documents to meet a standard that is changing to allow non-sequential headings and documents to begin with any heading level or do we use best practices for creating more accessible documents?
> >
> > I use the Title Style all the time and if I want to adhere to PDF/UA I just use F2 in the Tags Tree and change it to <H1> in Acrobat. Given what we may have to remediate in the tags Tree, this is a minor remediation.
> >
> > Cheers, Karen
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf
> > Of L Snider
> > Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2019 3:34 PM
> > To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
> > Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Something About Formatting Word Docs Feels
> > Wrong For Whatever Reason
> >
> > I echo Elizabeth in terms of headings of Word documents. I wish Word would take out the title style, as it confuses people no end in terms of headings (the logical choice would be to choose title for the title, not heading 1...). You can also not include the Heading 1 in the options of the custom table of contents, makes it easier when the table has to be updated (which I do constantly).
> >
> > Cheers
> >
> > Lisa
> >
> > On Tue, Apr 23, 2019 at 1:19 PM Elizabeth Thomas < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> > >
> > > I do the document title as heading 1. Main sections are heading 2. I know that some people have multiple heading 1s per document, and it's not actually incorrect, but I try to stick to one heading 1 per document, which is the document's title. This does, however, result in needing to manual remove the heading 1 from the table of contents. Also, Word's title tag maps to a <p> tag in the PDF whereas heading 1 just maps to heading 1.
> > >
> > > -Elizabeth Thomas
> > >
> > > Sent from my iPhone
> > >
> > > > On Apr 23, 2019, at 9:10 AM, Jim Homme < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Hi,
> > > > I've been formatting my Word documents like this:
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > * Title of document using Title style
> > > > * Optional subtitle using Subtitle style
> > > > * Main sections with Heading 1 style
> > > >
> > > > I've done this to keep the document title out of the table of contents, if it has one.
> > > >
> > > > This feels wrong to me, because if the same document were a web document or a PDF document, I might have the document title duplicated as a heading 1, with document sections at heading 2. For documents I want to convert to PDF, I don't want to keep changing styles.
> > > >
> > > > I'm keeping this simple just to illustrate what I'm saying.
> > > >
> > > > Does this seem like I'm obsessing too much about this to you, or just how do you do this?
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > =========> > > > Jim Hommegood plan?
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Digital Accessibility
> > > > Bender Consulting Services
> > > > 412-787-8567
> > > > https://www.benderconsult.com/our%20services/hightest-accessible
> > > > -t
> > > > ec
> > > > hnology-solutions
> > > >
> > > >
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