> 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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