PDF: the Road to Adventure

RantWoman would never guess for instance from hype over at http://www.adobe.com/ that the three little letters P D F would be such a road to adventure. RantWoman would not guess at the moment because clicking on the accessibility link there sent something RantWoman does not want to think about on her own machine off into hyperspace.



RantWoman suspects SOME of her problms might go away if she would ever get around to looking at this webinar

http://rantwoman.blogspot.com/2010/04/webinar-on-accessibility-features-of.html

RantWoman has already written of adventures with inaccessible forms.
http://rantwoman.blogspot.com/2010/05/fix-this.html


Today's themes are


--How to go wrong converting PDF to Word


and


--PDF Marries Death By Powerpoint!

Let us begin with file conversion.

RantWoman's house of worship is talking about a remodel project. RantWoman would point out that the activities she needs to do are things like review documents and budgets, things that, say, any adult engaged in a volunteer activity might be doing. These would in fact be job-related activities that one might want to tell one's rehab professionals about as illustration that one is engaged in work-related activities.


One MIGHT want to tell one's rehab professionals about this, except for the following conflict: one's religion might advocate being honest about the nature of the organization one is engaged in these activities for, but IF one is honest one may find oneself in challenging separation of church and state conversations. Or maybe it is just RantWoman who is nearly always able to find some digression from the most direct path between A and B.



But back to our budgets. There is a task force. There architectural drawings which RantWoman does not care that much about because she understands the nature of the proposed changes. There is a report combining text, drawings and numbers. RantWoman received the report via email a good while ago. RantWoman opened the file and got the dreaded message from Mr. JAWS "Warning Empty File."



RantWoman is not sufficiently schooled in PDF arcana to know all the ways to generate such messages. RantWoman poked at a couple methods to try to make Mr. JAWS acknowledge the text, but if the text is a graphical image, there is no hope. RantWoman considered visual inspection with Zoom and became crabby on formatting grounds. RantWoman does not own a scanner or an OCR program to solve the problem herself. RantWoman thus turned to the people who created and emitted the document.



RantWoman THOUGHT she wrote clear directions asking to start with a file upstream from the PDF but the next effort she received had taken the PDF document and tried to incorporate it into Word. The result was a technical artifact twice the size of the original PDF but no more readable to Mr. JAWS than the original. RantWoman does NOT want to know how that happened. RantWoman is now back to trying to connect with the person who originally created the numbers section of the document. RantWoman HOPES this will be productive.




On to yet another of RantWoman's amazing adventures with Powerpoint.


RantWoman is signed up to go to a technology event. The event organizers are being very nice about RantWoman's reasonable accommodations request so far which is why the event does not get mentioned.





What is RantWoman's request? RantWoman, as previously noted has at best a stormy relationship with Powerpoint. RantWoman likes to request Powerpoints in advance of the presentations where they are to be used. Furthermore, RantWoman has MUCH better success interacting with native Powerpoint than with Powerpoint files converted to PDF's. For instance, in native Powerpoint, RantWoman can sometimes look at the actual data behind all those pretty charts and graphs that are sort of a key Powerpoint raison d'etre. RantWoman has sent in several rounds of emails clarifying this point and is kind of waiting with bated breath for the promised email.



For some reason inexplicable to RantWoman people project their spiffy Powerpoint exercises in graphical excess all over public screens and then elucidate the presentations with helpful comments such as "This one here" and "like that." Then these same people sometimes become all touchy about intellectual property and confidentiality when a mere mortal asks for a copy of the file just for meaningful interaction. RantWoman has a time or two had to assure event organizers that she has no malevolent desires but simply wants something like meaningful access. RantWoman leads such an adventure-filled life!