Re: Blank Pages & Screen Readers

Others may have better technical answers (and Leonie has given you one data
point already) but this sounds to me like someone misunderstood some good
advice and turned it backwards. I wouldn't be surprised if what they were
told was that they *shouldn't* insert a blank page in the middle of a
document because a screen reader user might think that was the end of the
content and never read the rest. But that got changed into thinking that
they *should* put a blank page at the end, because then a screen reader user
would know it was the end.

-Madeleine

-- 
Madeleine Rothberg
Carl and Ruth Shapiro Family National Center for Accessible Media at WGBH
http://ncam.wgbh.org
madeleine_rothberg@wgbh.org

On 11/5/10 3:04 PM, "William R Williams" <wrwilliams@fs.fed.us> wrote:

> 
> All, 
> 
> I have been assisting some co-workers and contractors in producing accessible,
> 2-page PDF files from some fairly complicated Word templates, while following
> various guidelines, tutorials, etc. available for this workflow (such as
> Adobe's accessibililty guides for PDFs). Someone provided the following
> statement to me which I have never heard before ... and somehow doesn't seem
> intuitive: 
> 
> "A third page that is blank was also added because we are told that when a
> screen reader encounters a blank page that's a signal to the screen reader
> that it is at the end of the document."
> 
> It seems to me that an end of a document is the end and no further "signals"
> are necessary. I wonder if this is accurate, is it recommended as a best
> practice? 
> 
> Any information or experiences with this is appreciated. Thanks!
> 
> Bill Williams <http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/>

Received on Friday, 5 November 2010 19:46:40 UTC