For the first time, instead of creating my slides in XHTML/javascript (I like Eric Meyer’s S5), I used Open Office Impress. I figured, “why not.” We’re using Open Office for the book and it works pretty well. Plus, I noticed I could export my presentation in tagged PDF. I assumed I would happily and easily generate a tagged PDF and that would be that. So, on I trudged, delivering the file without testing it.

Today, I wanted to publish my slides on my website and on slideshare. So, I opened Acrobat to take a look at the accessibility of the PDF. I knew that the images would not have text equivalents so I was prepared to add those. I was not prepared for the following 4 hours of frustration…which is resulting not in an accessible PDF but in this blog post.

First off, Open Office Impress did not generate a tagged PDF despite me checking the checkbox. boo!

Secondly, when I generated XHTML instead of PDF, I lost all of the formatting and images. boo!

Thirdly, Acrobat only saves about 45 characters worth of each of the descriptions of the images despite giving me a text box that will allow me to enter at least 256 characters (I’m guessing because that’s the limit in the HTML 4.01 spec). boo!

I learned a valuable lesson today: all future decks will start and end in XHTML.

The book…in process. This is a screen shot taken with my phone then emailed to flickr. I wanted to see what they would do with the text.

First, I edited the title of the photo on my phone from random text (imgnnn) to “Testing” then I created an email with “Testing for text” as the subject and “Will this text show as description?” in the body. Flickr used the email subject as the title of the photo and the body as description. Cool!

On the flickr page for this photo, the actual alt is null. How do you folks feel about that? Since the title is a good equivalent, does the image itself need an equivalent in the alt attribute? I certainly want an alt present on the image element – even if it is null – to indicate that it has been considered. I could repeat the title as the alt value, but that would be redundant. Too bad there isn’t a way to associate the heading with the image to indicate they create a single semantic unit, but then again, this whole page is metadata for this image…in a sense the whole page is a single semantic unit.

If you all had this debate while I’ve been “away,” please point me to the archives. Thanks!