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Re: Word viewer

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From: Moore, Michael
Date: Nov 16, 2006 8:00AM

Cheryl,

Word is natively accessible to screen reader users who have MS Office
installed on their systems but there are some limitations of the
program. Word ART is not accessible, alt text is only available if you
use word to convert the document to html, then of course there are all
of the semantic and structural problems of word html to deal with.
Tables are linearized when read, but some advanced users may be able to
designate a row as the heading row and a column as a heading column with
JAWS. Heading and list structure are not visible to screen readers,
although the character used a bullet will usually be read.

In an ideal world the documents should be converted to html. The
University of Illinois has a pretty good tool for converting ms office
documents (much better than what is built into office).
http://www.accessiblewizards.uiuc.edu/ It is reasonably priced too.

Here at DARS ([Texas] Department of Assistive and Rehabilitative
Services) we regularly use ms office formats for internal
communications. We have several hundred staff members who use assistive
technology to access these documents. Simpler documents work best (text
only word documents, excel spreadsheets with single layers of row and
column headings, and PowerPoint presentations that are designed using
the guidelines laid out by Freedom Scientific.

One important factor to remember is that the documents must be opened in
the stand alone application after being downloaded from the web. IE
will open these documents inside of the browser with the default
settings. JAWS and other screen readers use application based
configuration settings to determine how to read a document and thus are
basically in the wrong mode to read word, excel and PDF documents when
opened within the browser. This can be remedied through user education
or manipulation of user configuration settings on the desktop.

Mike