Re: What makes a document inaccessible?

[Jason White <jasonw ariel its unimelb edu au>]

On Mon, Dec 18, 2006 at 01:46:27PM -0500, Brette Luck wrote:
> At the accessibility summit, it was mentioned that people often
> unknowingly create open office documents that are not accessible.  I
> know that one example of this is when people simply change the font
> size to indicate that there's a heading.  What are other specific
> things that users do that make documents inaccessible or hard for an
> assistive technology to interpret?

Anything that creates presentational markup, where the document format
supports structural markup which would better expose the block-level and
inline structure of the document. Word processor files have historically been
bad examples, as authors are often not encouraged to use styles/templates, but
instead resort to using tabs, spaces and other layout operators in place of,
for example, headings, lists, paragraphs, etc. Introducing graphics/sounds
without providing textual descriptions is another type of accessibility
barrier.

Poor writing also creates accessibility problems that particularly affect
people with cognitive disabilities.

I haven't looked at ODF in enough detail to determine the extent to which it
encourages to use of structural markup in documents. Obviously this also
depends on the user interface of the authoring tool, e.g., OpenOffice. This is
why, for the Web, the W3C publishes both Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
and Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines; the latter are substantially
concerned with features in the authoring tool that assist the author in
creating documents (i.e., Web content) of greater accessibility.

Personally, I don't use word processors anymore. I switched to LaTeX in the
late 1990's and have never looked back.