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Some of these tips may sound familiar, because there are fundamental
accessibility principles that apply to all documents. When creating
files in a word processor:
Use Structural Styles
Maintaining basic
structure with structural tags is important for
many reasons, but to give an example of why this is necessary, EmacSpeak,
a spoken browser
for UNIX and LINUX systems, can convert HTML, WORD and other
files fully or can create a summary document from the structural
tags. Users of EmacSpeak,
who may be visually impaired, rely on these summaries to 'get the
gist' of documents to save time and to decide if it is worth getting
the complete version. If structural tags are absent, the meaning
of the document may be lost when it is converted.
Converting Documents to HTML
You may want to consider converting your files to HTML. However,
doing this will not necessarily increase the accessibility of
your
information, since the 'garbage in = garbage out' principle applies,
as it also does to documents
converted to PDF. Converting files to HTML is only a reasonable
option for simple documents or those that use
structural tags and
navigation aids.
Microsoft WORD allows you to convert documents into web pages.
However, a large number of custom tags will be added to the code,
nominally to enable you to take pages back into WORD (rather that
always publishing forward, which is more logical). Apart from
increasing the size of the page, these tags may cause some browsers,
including screen
readers, to misinterpret and therefore display the page incorrectly.
These should be cleaned up. Macromedia
Dreamweaver MX comes with a command that
cleans up WORD HTML.
Alternatively, you can generate HTML from Microsoft WORD with the University of Illinois Accessible Web Publishing Wizard for Microsoft Office
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