Re: Creating an accessible Table of Contents

you have summarized it in a nutshell, and as someone who does a fair 
amount of research it is extremely frustrating to get to the document you 
need and not be able to use it.

Bob


On Fri, 1 Mar 2013 deborah.kaplan@suberic.net wrote:

> Date: Fri, 1 Mar 2013 12:40:58 -0500 (EST)
> From: deborah.kaplan@suberic.net
> To: accessys@smart.net
> Cc: "w3c-wai-ig@w3.org list" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
> Subject: Re: Creating an accessible Table of Contents
> Resent-Date: Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:41:27 +0000
> Resent-From: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> 
> On Fri, 1 Mar 2013, accessys@smart.net wrote:
>
>> I agree pdf has made great strides but getting archivist especially to tag 
>> the documents they scan is getting harderd and harder it seems
>
> Speaking as both an accessibility professional and as an
> archivist, this is a real dilemma for us when creating PDFs.
> Creating accessible PDF is extremely slow, and the creation of
> digital digital documents is often about throughput. PDFs in
> archives are usually created in one of three ways:
>
> 1. We scan documents and create PDFs from the OCR'd scans. This
> is a process which is all about doing as much as possible, and is
> often either outsourced or work given to paraprofessionals or
> student workers. Technology has increased to the point that
> scanning, character recognition, and creation of a PDF can happen
> in bulk very, very quickly. But the creation of tags on each of
> those individual PDFs is still brutally slow and manual, and
> requires understanding of the content and structure of the
> document.
>
> 2. We are given PDFs by people giving us born digital documents.
> Again, tagging the individual PDFs is brutally slow and manual,
> and requires understanding of the content and structure of the
> document.
>
> 3. We are given documents in other formats (often Microsoft Word)
> which we convert to PDF. These will automatically become
> accessible PDF as long as they were accessible in the first place
> -- but they very often aren't. Nobody but accessibility
> folks puts alternative text into images in Word documents, not
> least because it's actually really difficult and nonintuitive.
> And if the original document is created without using techniques
> which the PDF converter can understand to create tags (such as
> word styles) then there's not much the archivist can do.
>
> Ultimately, part of this is the ongoing problem of digitization.
> But Adobe actually CAN solve part of this problem, by making the
> process of tagging something which can be done easily and
> quickly, in an interface which is not a complete usability and
> accessibility nightmare in and of itself. If tagging were something
> which were easy for everyone to do, and didn't require Acrobat
> professional, it might at least happen sometimes. We would still
> have the digitization throughput problem, but there would be some
> slight improvement.
>
> -Deborah Kaplan
> Accessibility team co-lead, Dreamwidth Studios LLC
> Digital Resources Archivist, Tufts University
>

Received on Friday, 1 March 2013 19:49:09 UTC