WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Thread: Re: Spam?:Re: QUESTION: ISO end-user level tools forconvertingfiles toPDF or other accessible form

for

Number of posts in this thread: 1 (In chronological order)

From: Moore, Michael
Date: Wed, Dec 12 2007 9:20AM
Subject: Re: Spam?:Re: QUESTION: ISO end-user level tools forconvertingfiles toPDF or other accessible form
No previous message | No next message

Yes, we were able to do this with Adobe 7 prior to the upgrade. The
major benefit we have found in Adobe 8 is that they have finally added a
spell checker to the Designer interface that is use to create forms from
scratch. One additional note to Lisa's original question, if you are
working with MS word forms you will need to add the form inputs to the
form after the conversion. Because of the way that we design our word
forms, we have found that we get a better quality output by rebuilding
the forms in Designer but this is labor intensive.

Mike

-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
[mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of Cliff Tyllick
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 11:57 AM
To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Subject: Spam?:Re: [WebAIM] QUESTION: ISO end-user level tools
forconvertingfiles toPDF or other accessible form

Does it have to be Acrobat Pro 8 to work this smoothly? Or is 7.0 good
enough?

>>> = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = 12/11/2007 11:42:51 AM >>>

Lisa,

I support Mike's suggestion to use Adobe Acrobat Professional to do this
conversion. With Office 2003, I have used other PDF conversion programs
(free or shareware) and I do not think they produced accessible
documents even if the original document was accessible (ALTs for images,
etc.).
The
Acrobat Professional has an "accessibility wizard" that will test the
document and provide a play-by-play description on how to fix the file
to pass the accessibility test. This works with MS Office 2003 and
newer.
Some
PDF conversions will "pass" without having to do anything else, some
will not, and in my experimentation, it seems the older the document,
the greater the chance it would NOT pass and need additional tweaking.

I recently updated to MS Office 2007 (and I am sorry I did, but that's
another story) and the Acrobat Professional plug-in automatically
installed into the Office 2007 suite. It seems to work just fine.

There is, however, a free download from MS that supposedly allows you to
convert Office docs to PDFs (see
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4
AE6-
B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en ) But I have not used this so I do not
know if it will produce accessible docs -

Anyone out there using this who can share their experiences?

BTW, the most difficult documents to make accessible are those created
with desktop publishing software, like MS-Publisher and Adobe PageMaker.
Not sure if the newer versions work better - I'm still testing - but if
content is in columns or moved around the document (e.g., continue on
page 5 types of
layout) it will be difficult to create an accessible document.
PageMaker was
better at this than Publisher 2003.

~j

John E. Brandt
Augusta, Maine USA
www.jebswebs.com


-----Original Message-----
From: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
[mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = ] On Behalf Of Lisa Goldberg
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 12:13 PM
To: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Subject: [WebAIM] QUESTION: ISO end-user level tools for converting
files to PDF or other accessible formats

Hi everyone,

Let's say you have a scenario where end users (like clients) have to
convert their Word, Powerpoint and Excel files to PDF or other
accessible formats. I'm not just talking about simple Word docs, but
also Word forms and PPTs with multimedia components.

Is there a tool that you would recommend for this job?

Thanks,
Lisa



--

Buy Mabel's Labels and Support the AIDS Foundation of Chicago:
http://aidsmarathonchicago.mabel.ca