RDIGAll presentation materials for RDIG events must be accessible. In W3C we use Slidemaker tool for creating slides for the Web. Oftentimes, converting slides from other formats to HTML produces inaccessible HTML. Using the slidemaker tool can help you generate accessible HTML slides. Regardless of what method you choose to generate your slides, we will help you ensure your slides are accessible and available on the RDIG Web site before the date of the event.
The W3C Slidemaker tool reads a single HTML file (named "all.htm"). By using the H1 element to title each new slide, slidemaker will generate a separate html file for each slide and generate the navigation buttons needed to link from slide-to-slide.
Regardless of how you generate your slides, they should be evaluated for conformance to (at a minimum) Level A the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 (checklist), and preferably to Level AA.
The accessibility can be checked by evaluating the accessibility of the "all.htm" file. Accessibility evaluation tools can be used to help. Keep in mind that the structure begins again at each H1 header in the final slides, so having several H1 headers in the all.htm file is not a problem.
Slides are usually simple, consisting primarily of paragraphs, links and lists. Often the main issue with making accessible slides is providing good text equivalents and descriptions for images.
Checkpoint 1.1 is applicable for images. According to it each graphic (or any other non-text) element should have a text equivalent. In our case, each IMG element should have an "alt" attribute explaining the purpose of the image. Similarly each OBJECT element should offer a text equivalent in the content.
Complex images should have an additional link for a detailed description of the content of the image. In HTML this link can be provided with a "longdesc" attribute in IMG element, with a link inside an OBJECT element, or with a description link marked with [D].
National Braille Association provides good instructions for describing complex images.
Gottfried Zimmermann's slides from our first collaboration related event are a good example of accessible slides. Most of the slides contain HTML paragraphs and lists of links.
Slide 4 has a complex .gif image with the following "alt" attribute explaining the purpose of the image: "System setup for experimental text captioning at SC2002".
The detailed content of the image is explained in the "longdesc" attribute as well as in a long description link marked with [D] because some tools don't yet understand the "longdesc". In addition, the image has an SVG version, which provides more structure that may be used by some clients to explain different parts of the image to people who cannot see the image. The SVG version is not a requirement but it is highly recommended.
$Date: 2004/06/03 00:07:48 $ $Author: wendy $ (originally authored by Marja)
