WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: PPT to clean HTML

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Dec 16, 2004 8:36AM

On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, michael.brockington wrote:

> > JPEG isn't a W3C technology. Neither is GIF.
> They are both De-Facto standards.

Sure. And so is PowerPoint in its own area. You cannot object to
PowerPoint on the grounds that it is not a W3C technology
and not apply the same objection to other non-W3C technologies.

> > If the presentation contains diagrams, the appropriate method
> > is to present them as GIF images (perhaps with SVG versions
> > presented as
> > alternatives) embedded into HTML documents and with textual
> > presentations of their essential content in a suitable way -
> > which would often mean that a separate presentation needs to
> > be written by someone.
>
> So you've changed your mind then? How does the above paragraph differ from
> what was proposed (apart from the trivial change from JPEG to GIF)?

The proposed method converted each slide into an image. _All_ the content
is in images (maybe with alt attributes, but I haven't seen them).
What I propose is a normal HTML document where you use normal markup
(headers, lists, tables, etc.), using images just for things that _need_
to be presented as images.

> > But it would be absurd to present _all_ the content, even the
> > texts, as images, and call this a massive improvement in
> > accessibility.
>
> Any improvement on something that is completely inaccessible to many has to
> be classed as a significant improvement.

Significant? In what sense?

If there is a highly inaccessible format and we create another highly, but
differently, inaccessible format, then it's of course an improvement in
some sense, if there is even a single person who can access the latter but
not the former. But it's rather ridiculous as compared with making the
document accessible to almost all by presenting it as a simple HTML
document.

> In every environment I have ever worked in, it has been easier to seperatly
> get the resources for two upgrades than for a single double-size upgrade.

I don't think doing things stepwise is a good idea for converting a PPT
presentation into an accessible format. Each step adds rather little. The
total cost is considerable, since two steps wouldn't really suffice.
There's also the hidden cost caused by errors and fixing them. Each
conversion has a risk of inadvertantly losing some of the content or even
distorting it. And image format isn't really a good starting point for any
future conversions. You don't want to convert data from text to image,
then try to convert it back to text. In effect you would start from the
original again.

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/