Hey blind people, what is the recommended accessible format for distributing text-only content?
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@skye in practice using markdown to get proper semantic HTML is a good workflow. There are nice free markdown editors that offer you some comfort as an author, even if you never wrote a line of HTML in your life. Also those you can send to anyone because due to the ubiquitous web there is almost no device that does not render HTML somehow
An HTML website that is just a single document is easy to download and people who navigate the world with a screenreader usually know how to do that (it is „file>save as“ or the share button on your phone if you forgot)
@skye also be aware that the overwhelming majority of blind people are those who lose their sight at very old age (think 80+). They are often unwilling or incapable of learning braille and screenreaders properly. So some advice written by non-blind and especially institutions of care or the state centres their experience. But realistically the people who work with screenreaders are mostly young(ish) people who have been blind their whole life or lost sight early in life and of course move very differently through life. Lots of things focus on the elderly who are blind for a few years before dying. If in doubt, and if you aren’t specifically offering something consumed mostly by very old people, it is better to focus on the young and their needs
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@skye also be aware that the overwhelming majority of blind people are those who lose their sight at very old age (think 80+). They are often unwilling or incapable of learning braille and screenreaders properly. So some advice written by non-blind and especially institutions of care or the state centres their experience. But realistically the people who work with screenreaders are mostly young(ish) people who have been blind their whole life or lost sight early in life and of course move very differently through life. Lots of things focus on the elderly who are blind for a few years before dying. If in doubt, and if you aren’t specifically offering something consumed mostly by very old people, it is better to focus on the young and their needs
@skye also just to be clear in my time as an assistant the blind student was my boss and I did whatever she wanted the way she wanted it as best as I could. I sometimes stumbled upon new features/ideas and proposed/demonstrated them, but in the end the important part in that kind of work is that you very strongly centre your boss and what they want and not the ton of sighted people trying to influence them. Be they doctors, relatives, bureaucrats, professors or welfare institutions.
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@lunareclipse It surprises me though, I would have thought that at some point in the last 25 years or so that pdf has been the default document type we would have managed to make them accessible…? Clearly I continue to be too optimistic about these things
@skye @lunareclipse i recently noticed an option to make an "accessible pdf" when you export a libreoffice writer document to a pdf. no idea what that does though and considering i only had one headline and a couple paragraphs of text with no images or anything else and it asked me to fix several things it might not be very stable / easy to use...
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@lunareclipse It surprises me though, I would have thought that at some point in the last 25 years or so that pdf has been the default document type we would have managed to make them accessible…? Clearly I continue to be too optimistic about these things
@skye @lunareclipse PDF files can be made accessible by ensuring that they're tagged properly with semantic structure. There are multiple tools that can do this. Word, Google Docs, Acrobat Pro and others can all provide the tools you need. If you can provide some details on the types of files, I can give you further guidance.
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@WeirdWriter @skye The issue with HTML is that a lot of browsers these days will refuse to download HTML, and will just open it. For less techy people, actually saving an HTML file they got from a link can be challenging. And markdown is fine on desktop, but I'm not aware of anything on mobile that allows navigating by headings in a markdown file. Personally I'd say epub. There are free programs on all the platforms that can open epub, browsers just download it by default, making accessible epubs is as easy as making accessible html, and it will work for blind and sighted alike so you don't need to create two different documents.
@fastfinge @skye Yeah, Epub is fantastic too far far far better than PDF
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@skye Properly tagged PDFs can work, but depending on how the PDF is generated, getting the tagging done correctly can be anything from slightly tricky to impossible. But if you go with epub, it's pretty much the same as generating accessible HTML. A lot easier.
@fastfinge Thank you!
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@skye @lunareclipse PDF files can be made accessible by ensuring that they're tagged properly with semantic structure. There are multiple tools that can do this. Word, Google Docs, Acrobat Pro and others can all provide the tools you need. If you can provide some details on the types of files, I can give you further guidance.
@ppatel @lunareclipse Thank you! Like I said, in this specific case it is just plain text, no images, no tables, a few hundred words. Some paragraphs and lots of unordered lists.
I am perfectly capable of using markup languages, I just want it to be easily downloadable even for non-technical users, which usually doesn’t work so well with HTML. Sounds like epub might be the way to go, though I can just as easily offer both a markdown and an epub version
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