E-mail List Archives
Thread: accomodating repeated links (WAS Re: examples of acc essible sites )
Number of posts in this thread: 2 (In chronological order)
From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Mon, Sep 20 2004 9:29AM
Subject: Re: accomodating repeated links (WAS Re: examples of acc essible sites )
No previous message | Next message →
> I'd use:
>
> title of form 1: MS Word, title of form 1: Adobe
> PDF
I like that option because of its simplicity, but it tends to make a rather
muddy page for those using fully visual browsers. It becomes much harder to
quickly scan the list looking for the specific file format you want
(especially if we add more file formats).
> Well, almost: Better to use .rtf instead of MS Word.doc format
Well, it'd be best if we didn't have these paper forms anymore, but that's a
few decades away. ;o)
As for Word, from an accessibility course I took last year, taught by those
with visual sight impairments, I was shown that often Excel and MS Word can
be much more accessible than PDF, as products like JAWS are tailored
specifically for these applications. Of course, WORD is complately
inaccessible if you don't have Word (for the most part) so no argument there
than adding additional file formats isn't a bad thing.
-Darrel
From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Mon, Sep 20 2004 10:01AM
Subject: Re: accomodating repeated links (WAS Re: examples of acc essible sites )
← Previous message | No next message
> is that an anti-M$ sentiment or is there an accessibility issue? I'm
> genuinely interested if it's an accessibility issue.
On a basic level, RTF is simply accessible to more types of word processing
and text viewing applications, so in terms of pure numbers, RTF will be more
accessible. In terms of usability, from my understanding, screen readers
like JAWs are designed to work directly with Word documents. Granted, it's
very easy to make a structurally sloppy Word file, so in some ways, the way
the document is structured is more important than the actual file type.
As a Mac user without MS Word installed, at least prior to the 10.3 update,
I found all Word documents rather inaccessible for me. ;o)
-Darrel