Re: ACollab Work Groups 1.1 Content accessible?]

> content our clients create is done with MS Word because the content is
> often used for multiple purposes. The content creators we work with are

This is an area where short term versus long term considerations 
probably go against accessibility.  Taking a long term view, it is
quite possible that the real solution is create tools that take input
in an application specific markup language (possibly as simple as
a table in a spread sheet) and format them into various formats.
The problem with this is it tends require an upfront time investment,
when people may always be rushed off their feet, and requires some
programming skills.

> to a wide variety of limitations they face. It is my belief that if Word
> (and other content creation tools) could create clean, standards-based
> HTML (and if you know how to do this easily, I'm very interested), then

A pre-requisite for this is that authors use the styles, defined by Word,
to mark up the document properly, which means that the authors still have
to understand structural markup, and not operate in a lazy WYSIWYG mode.
I don't know how well this markup is reflected into the HTML generated
by Word, but I believe that Acrobat uses it to create tagged PDF, which
is essentially an HTML structural overlay on the page description.
This is more or less the same as for direct HTML authoring; that can,
and more often than not, is done in a non-structural way.

However, I suspect that Word, used properly would be fairly easy to
convert, provided the document didn't contain any vector images.
(I have, incidentally, noticed a trend towards bitmapped images in
formats that support vector images and where a vector image is the
right choice.)

> easier to create valid HTML, combined with better education. We find

Creating valid HTML, in the sense that it passes the W3C Validator, is
a relatively mechanical process.  Creating semantically valid HTML
from a purely physical document is an AI problem.

Received on Friday, 18 June 2004 02:50:20 UTC