I recently received an email from an acquaintance:
I would love to talk with you about ways of making accessible documents using a Mac.
…in partnership with the Blind and Low Vision Education Network, and local and central government, [we have] embarked on a project called Secondary Sight, whose long-term goal is an online, personalised education system which is equitable for all. Part of this journey is a project which will see tutorials for teachers on how to create accessible documents for their students.
I replied that unfortunately I was unable to help — I really don’t have any expertise in making documents accessible The web’s another matter — I have quite a few clues there.
Some Googling didn’t really help locate any experts either.
If you do this kind of work, or know how to locate someone who does, please leave a comment on this post. Although my acquaintance is in New Zealand, I’m sure this expertise could be sourced from anywhere.




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What do they mean by documents? Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org, or an Office package by Apple? If by documents they mean HTML then I would imagine that it’s mostly still around how to use HTML authoring tools. Do you know if the person asking the question knows exactly what they’re asking about?
I believe that Joe Clark is interested in Mac accessibility, perhaps you could ask him. Eg,
http://blog.fawny.org/category/macintosh-supremacy/
Thanks for the Joe Clark suggestion – I had mentioned him.
My correspondent is a blind person, and I’m pretty sure she’s asking about documents like Word, Open Source office-type documents etc.
Probably word processing or other documents that teachers might hand out to students perhaps worksheets and so on.
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