[thelist] Posting Word Documents Vs. Creating Web Pages (Intr anet)

David.Cantrell at Gunter.AF.mil David.Cantrell at Gunter.AF.mil
Tue Oct 8 14:18:22 CDT 2002


>Word/Powerpoint/Excel documents on my company's intranet are the bane of
>my life!  I hate them!  I would strongly suggest converting them, and
>here's the reasons:

I think the issue is convert them to html vs leave them in binary format. If
you are in a controlled environment and know everyone has Office, then
binary is fine. That's what I do. And Index Server can index the content no
problem.

Now, if the issue is convert to MS HTML vs clean up the HTML, then
definitely clean it up! You can do all your documents in no time flat with
Tidy.

As for accessibility, the users would have to be able to use Office in the
first place to work with the documents otherwise, therefore they have to
have some form of screen reader or screen magnifier software already in
place, so there shouldn't be a problem. I used to work with a man who was
legally blind but could still see a little bit, provided his screen was
magnified so much you could read his tiny icon text across the room, and he
still had to have his nose literally pressed to the screen. But it worked,
and he could work relatively well. He didn't need WAI or anything else in
order to use MS Office documents, though it would certainly have helped him
navigate the web to download those documents... :(

Man I'm opinionated today! ;P

-dave



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