Resources for Making Documents Accessible

from Molly Emmings, Account Manager

on November 11, 2010

6 comments

The State of Minnesota is in the midst of implementing standards to make technology accessible for those who have hearing and/or vision impairment. This is an important and massive mission, and will take many years to get to a place where true accessibility is more “the norm” than not. But every baby step counts, especially to those who rely on assistive devices or other alternate ways to access information via technology.

On Tuesday November 9, the Fredrickson Intersect group helped facilitate training about this initiative by having Tanya Belanger of the Minnesota Office of Enterprise Technology present on how to make documents and presentations accessible. This was the second session of our three-part series about this specific undertaking.

We promised to make downloads of Tanya’s presentation, as well as the Social Security Administration’s Guide to Producing accessible Word and PDF Documents – a valuable resource which Tanya discussed in our session – available, so here are the links:

The Social Security Administration's Guide to Producing Accessible Word and PDF Documents (Microsoft Word document)

PowerPoint Presentation used by Tanya Belanger at the November 2010 Intersect meeting (.zip format for download)

Jed Becher from the DNR also sent this great document about improving accessibility with Adobe's InDesign: Creating Accessible PDF Documents with Adobe InDesign CS4 (.pdf document)

Finally, here's the full CART services transcript of the meeting: Intersect November 2010 Transcript (.txt document)

Comments

Thank you for sharing the notes from presentation. I look forward to hearing if there are more talks about turning this into an online training course that we can distribute to all staff through our new enterprise learning management system.

by Karen Underhill
on November 12, 2010 - 10:18

Great presentation.  Thanks for sharing on-line since I ended up not being able to attend the meeting.

I don’t see anything mention about MS Office 2010 and it being incompatible with Adobe for making accessible PDFs.  The MS Office add-in doesn’t work and you have to print to a PDF instead.  Longer steps to get an accessible PDF.  Adobe reports that it will be fixed in the upcoming release of Adobe Acrobat X.

by David Hammer
on November 12, 2010 - 12:14

We appreciate the comments...good to know we’re being read.  Keep ‘em coming, everyone!

Jed, thanks for the InDesign doc, and Tanya, thanks for passing along the complete transcript from our meeting.  I added those both above.

by Molly Emmings
on November 16, 2010 - 6:14

Do you have the link to the information that OET has put out on accessible documents? I am not finding it on the OET website.

by Kathryn Bauer
on November 19, 2010 - 3:55

Katie (and others) - here’s the link to the Accessibility Standard that was published on 9/1/10: http://www.state.mn.us/mn/externalDocs/OET/Accessibility_Standard_for_Minnesota_Executive_Branch_092710114823_Standard_OET000_Accessibility_090110.pdf

by Molly Emmings
on November 23, 2010 - 2:56

Kudos! What a neat way of thinikng about it.

by Bertha
on April 30, 2011 - 2:04

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