Re: PDF

HTML is pretty much always preferable to plain text because it allows
striuctures, links, and other important navigation features to be included,
as well as whatever multimedia and so on can be incorporated.

I am not very familiar with the clean up word feature in Dreamweaver, but I
would look in particular for conversion of headers to real header elements
(h1 h2), lists to real lists (not just paragraphs starting with bullets) and
so on, alternative text being provided for images and other
multimedia (if it doesn't ask for it, you can almost bet you need to use a
different tool to add it).

Have a look also at how it does the presentation - does it convert to CSS, or
does it use lots of entities (special characters), tables and font effects?

You may be interested in trying tidy as an alternative clean-up tool if
Dreamweaver doesn't meet your needs. http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett/tidy -
it is a free piece of software available for a lot of platforms, and is
designed to clean things like word document HTML.

There are other tools you could use - there is a list of some kept by the
Evaluation and Repair Tools group of WAI -
http://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/IG/existingtools

cheers

Charles McCN

On Mon, 14 Aug 2000, Michael W Baker wrote:

  I'm doing a site that has numerous large PDF documents. We are offering
  both PDF and Word versions. I also want to offoer an accessicble
  alternative. Is it better to convert them to straight text documents or to
  post them as html. Also, if I save them as web pages in Word and then use
  the "clean up Word html" action in Dreamwever3, will this render accessible
  html. If not what are the bugs I should look out for.
  Mike Baker
  Zin Technologies (formerly ADF)
  e-CITe Division
  (216) 977-0363
  bakerm@zin-tech.com
  

-- 
--
Charles McCathieNevile    mailto:charles@w3.org    phone: +61 (0) 409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative                      http://www.w3.org/WAI
Location: I-cubed, 110 Victoria Street, Carlton VIC 3053
Postal: GPO Box 2476V, Melbourne 3001,  Australia

Received on Monday, 14 August 2000 12:08:46 UTC