Really useful advice - thanks. I'll noted it now and play with it later :-)
A
-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion list for disabled students and their support staff. [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Simon Iremonger
Sent: 17 September 2013 19:57
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: CommonLook Office 1.2, LibreOffice Tagged-Hybrid-PDF and eLAIX/epub
> No experience of it and its exactly the right direction - the tools we
> use to create documents should help us to make documents with maximum accessibility.
> more accessible format per se. And if you wanted to move beyond Word
> in order to be suitable for tablets and smart phones then EPUB format
> would be more accessible than PDF. It is entirely possible to have an accessible PDF that you can't access accessibly because the PDF on your tablet hasn't been designed to exploit the accessibility features.
Hope I can chip-in-usefully....
You can just use LibreOffice (Windows, MAC OS X, GNU/Linux, ...).
Firstly, If you 'export as PDF' (built in!),
NB: Make sure "Embed OpenDocument file" and "Tagged PDF" are selected.
The resultant PDF file:-
* Contains the whole document structure (i.e. tagged), for accessible
reading.
* Works with "reflow" viewers (e.g. View > Zoom > ReFlow in adobe
reader), which is VERY helpful for text resizing, avoid horrible
scrolling around.
* Is a HYBRID file that can be re-opened. I.e. you can ask Libreoffice
to "open" the .pdf file explicitly, and it comes back in its' original
document editable form. -- Avoids all that mess with needing to
send both PDF and some-sort-of doc/docx/odt etc....
As others' have helpfully pointed-out, reader software varies in support of any features... not much can do about that!
AND, if you install the addon "eLAIX", http://elaix.org/home-en.html the result is that you can create functional ePUB files too.
Combine the above, maybe with a few carefully chosen Document Templates with sensible default fonts set in the styles etc... makes a very good PDF and ePUB on many platforms and free in both senses for everybody...
But, clearly, half the accessibility problem is in structuring the document properly in the first-place. E.g. Use the heading styles properly and do not fill the document with manual-formatting.
Notice the eLAIX addon comes with instructions that warn you about how to / how not to set up your document =).
My personal gripe is people who set the
font colour to "black" rather than "automatic" which then causes havoc if anybody changes the default display colours....
Hope thats', also, useful to all.
--Simon
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