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This resource provides information about common office documents and accessibility. Below are some handouts and supporting documents that were developed for an Accessible Documents Workshop offered at the University of Maine - Augusta.
In addition, we have been writing a series of articles about Accessible Documents for the Maine State Office of Technology (OIT) . We are going to post all of the articles here as a resource to support anyone interested in learning more about this topic.
7/25/08 - A Bit Off Message: Some might argue that the either article in the series "Social Networking and Accessibility" has nothing to do with accessible documents, I am providing this since increasingly businesses and organizations are considering (and using) social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to get their message out to consitutents. There a major accessibility issues with these platforms and this article talks about them.
6/26/08 - Out of synch: Due to some work conflicts the seventh article in the series is a little late and was published today.
5/14/08 - Captioning Updates: I have added some additional resources regarding Captioning to the Other Resources section below. These are things I discovered and used as part of the most recent OIT article.
4/13/08 - More Updates: I have added some new resources regarding accessible HyperText Markup Language (HTML). These relate to the series of articles about Accessible Documents that I have been writing for the Maine State Government Office of Technology (OIT). There is more information about accessibility on the Accessible Web Design home page.
3/12/08 - General Updates: I have been writing a series of articles about Accessible Documents for the Maine Office of Technology which have been posted on their website. As the content is useful to the general public, I have also posted all of the articles and resources on this page as well.
2/16/08 - PDF Plug-in for Word 2007: I found a good article on AbilityNet describing how one goes about creating accessible PDFs using the new plug-in available from Microsoft. While this appears to bypass the need to purchase Adobe Acrobat Professional - it should be noted that in the last step of the directions (in the article) they mention the need to test the final document in Acrobat. Ideally, this would be done with Acrobat Professional using the Accessibility Checker.
1/15/08 - Screencasts: I have started to replace the screencasts that were removed last month. I am now using Adobe Captivate 3 which creates accessible screencasts. I have made three thus far and had hoped to replicate all those that were taken off. Unfortunately, I also upgraded to MS-Office 2007 and no longer have access to MS-Office 2003 to be able to do the screencast. If you are really interested in how to do something with MS-Office 2003 and need some help, contact me at jeb@jebswebs.com
12/20/07 - Screencasts: The screencasts made on Jing Project that were posted here, have been removed because someone correctly pointed out they did not technically meet the accessibility standards since they were not captioned. They will return soon in accessible format.
12/11/07 - MS Office 2007: Since developing the workshop I have upgraded from MS Office 2003 to Office 2007. Apart for my utter regret for doing so - the number of problem areas are enormous - I am discovering, to my horror - that procedures that previous versions have had in place for many years no longer work and the new procedures are more complex, take longer and are non-intuitive. I am just about ready to strongly recommend against anyone upgrading to Office 2007, but I am still hoping my opinion will change.
In any case, I will be creating a whole new set of screencasts and procedures for how to accomplish these tasks using Office 2007 in the next few weeks.
11/1/07 - Headers and Footers: I've discovered that when converting a MS-Word (v. 2003) doc that is using Headers and Footers into a PDF, the Headers and Footers will appear in the PDF but may or may not be accessible. The conversion tool apparently recognized text from images, but will not let you modify them in the PDF form. It doesn't seem to matter if the original Word document is marked up correctly, Acrobat Professional is not able to make a clean conversion. For the time period, avoid the use of Headers and Footers in documents that are to be converted to PDF.
Article 1: Accessible Word Processor Documents
Article 2: Accessible Spreadsheet and Presentational Documents
Article 3: Portable Document Format (PDF) Files and Accessibility
Article 5 - General Considerations about Web-based Communications
Article 7 - Web 2.0 Applications and Accessibility
Article 8 - Social Networking and Accessibility
These documents/files are created in MS-Office 2003 and may require that program or plug-in to view
Accessible Documents Cover Sheet - MS-Publisher file
How to make an Adobe Acrobat file from Word doc - MS-Word Doc
How to use Headings and Styles - MS-Word Doc
How to add Alternative text to images in Word - MS-Word Doc
How to check the Language of the Word document - MS-Word Doc
How to check Tabled Information of a Word document - MS-Word Doc
Most Common Accessibility Errors - MS-Word Doc
Making Accessible Documents - MS-PowerPoint file
Sample of a PDF Form made with Adobe LiveCycle Design (with Print Button)
Sample of a PDF Form made with Adobe LiveCycle Design (without Print Button)
How to insert an image into a MS-Word 2007 document (Requires Flash plugin) [Close captioned]
How to add ALT text to chart in MS-Excel 2007 document (Requires Flash plugin) [No Audio]
How to add ALT text to an image in MS-Powerpoint 2007 document (Requires Flash plugin) [No Audio]
How to add ALT text to an image in Adobe LifeCycle Designer (Requires Flash plugin) [No Audio]
These are the resources directly related to Article 5 - General Considerations about Web-based Communications
WebAIM - Appropriate use of alternative text
Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) - Writing good ALT text (Excellent summary with place for comments)
Wikipedia - Alternative text for images
Jim Thatcher - text alternatives for images
Webcredible - Writing effective ALT text for images
Web Design Group (WDG) - Use of ALT texts in IMGs (Warning: this is long, complicated, and a bit dated)
WebAIM - Creating Accessible Tables
Jim Thatcher - Accessible tables
Accessify - Accessible Table Builder (actually builds the code for you)
evolt - Building Accessible Tables (old but interesting)
Maine CITE - My own example of layout tables and an example of a Data table
WebAIM - Creating Accessible Forms
Web Standards Project - Accessible HTML/XHTML Forms: Beginner Level
Jim Thatcher - Accessible Forms
A List Apart - Prettier Accessible Forms (lots of CSS if you are interested)
WebAIM - Introduction to Links and Hypertext
WebAIM
http://www.webaim.org/techniques/captions/
Universal Design in Maine blog
http://udmlti.edublogs.org/2008/04/02/accessibility-of-web-20-video/
Media Access Group at WGBH Boston
http://main.wgbh.org/wgbh/pages/mag/resources/guides/mag_guide_vol7.html
Captioning Web
http://www.captions.org/
National Captioning Institute
http://www.ncicap.org/
Joe Clark’s website
http://joeclark.org/access/captioning/
Captioning Web – Search Engine
http://www.captions.org/services.cfm
Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART)
http://www.cartinfo.org/
Automatic Synch Technologies
http://www.automaticsync.com/caption/
CC Maker
http://www.ccmaker.com/
CaptionMax
http://www.captionmax.com/
Captionate – Flash video
http://www.buraks.com/captionate/
C-Print
http://www.ntid.rit.edu/CPrint/
National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders
http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/caption.asp
National Association of the Deaf
http://www.nad.org/site/pp.asp?c=foINKQMBF&b=99547
Captioning Web
http://www.captions.org/softlinks.cfm
WebAIM
http://www.webaim.org/techniques/captions/software.php
These resources are found on the Adobe Acrobat Accessibility Training page. If you have difficulty viewing the videos below, use this link to go to the source page.
Using accessibility features within Acrobat 8 (SWF, 11.3M)
Assessing PDF files for accessibility (SWF, 7.5M)
Creating accessible PDF files (SWF, 16.4M)
There are a number of additional training guides and resources on this Adobe Acrobat Accessibility Training resource page. I recommend visiting that site and downloading these for your reference.
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