Improve accessibility of FreeCEN Newsletters — PDFs

[AlOneill]

Now that the Newsletters are being published for all users to read, we need to do as much as we can to make them accessible to all users, including screen reader users.

Unless a PDF is made to be accessible it won't be.

We are limited by the software that is available to us. Chris Mahoney cannot get LibreOffice (first choice) to work on his computer, so we are doing our best with OpenOffice (second choice). Initial testing is being done with VoiceOver in Preview on a Mac — Preview beats Safari and Acrobat Reader.

Chris is using a checker to look for typos and similar errors.

We are using a scoring scheme to roughly assess progress as we learn to make the best accessible PDFs in OpenOffice.

We could apply to have a Grackle Docs assessment in due course, maybe once all OpenOffice changes are in place.

[AlOneill]

• guide written for OpenOffice
• score improved from May to June, frm 29% to 52%

[DeniseColbert]

Part of BAU so closing

[AlOneill]

@DeniseColbert
I'm not sure why this has been closed – I do not know what BAU stands for.

There are further improvements to be made, but I need to discuss these with Chris first and get his agreement: some changes rely on his editing of the new pieces table; other changes risk alienating contributors. To give you an idea of what still needs to be tackled:

• keyboard-only access is rubbish – links are not reachable or operable
• table accessibility could be improved with a caption and the removal of the empty row
• image accessibility needs improvement
• we need a strategy to encourage writing styles that are more accessible

[AlOneill]

@DeniseColbert
Does BAU stand for beyond and above? If so, I don't think we have reached that point quite yet, unless you know something that I don't.

We probably won't be able to achieve link accessibility for keyboard-only users, but the other items are probably within reach.

[AlOneill]

@DeniseColbert
Of course, BAU doesn't stand for beyond and above. What was I thinking? Anyway, my comment still stands.