I work for a large financial institution and all our web sites need to be accessible for people with disabilities. We are using Eclipse BIRT to generate some reports and I want to explore if anyone out there has any experience in making the reports accessible. The main problem is that there is a lot of data in the report and some of it may not be understandable by the value alone, for instance a string like "123444" may be an account number, a check number or a transaction id. In a pure HTML page we will either use a dl/dt/dd construct to make it clear the purpose of the date, or we use ARIA attributes like aria-labelledby.
Another area of concern is the creation of accessible PDF files.
Any help or report on experience will be greatly appreciated.
Given your description I presume that you are focusing on blind users. One of the most popular screen readers for English language use is JAWS by Freedom Scientific There is a free trial version which you can download for testing and/or your organization can purchase a copy.
You can read your report with JAWS and find what issues need to be addressed. Proper labeling conventions for buttons and such is probably the most overlooked by developers. (i.e. Button123 with Image1A is the submit button, JAWS can't read the picture of words in the image, soo...)
Speaking from experience (I am closely associated with a blind computer user) stay away from PDF if you want it to be blind friendly. Web pages and text documents are much more blind friendly.
PDF works to create a version of a document that is static for visual appeal. In the process is chops up the text, when JAWS tries to read it it will read half of one item, then half of another, than maybe jump back to finish the last 1/3 of the first, leaving the middle 1/6 for last, it is painful. Of course a PDF that does not have text layer (i.e. a picture of a word document) is not readable by any screen reader.
Related
To preface this I'm not an ExactTarget expert.... We use ExactTarget and are interested in more archiving our email newsletters so that our subscribers can later use our articles as a reference. We have an archive folder set up in the exact target system, but that is not customer-facing and contains things like extra code.
As I understand it, the current process for archiving involves taking screenshots of the email that is sent out which is stitched together as a PDF. The PDF's are then stuck behind a password protected folder on a website.
Obviously, this is a hacky/low-tech way to do this.
Are there any ways to export these mails for archival purposes that people are using?
I am guessing from the above that you are using the premade templates and creating content using the Exact Target WYSIWYG editor. From there I am assuming also that these articles are in content boxes and HOPEFULLY each 'article' is in a single content box.
If so, then your best bet is to go to the HTML tab on this box and copy that code there and have this inserted onto your company blog (or website if you do not have a blog). Your network admin or website designer will likely know the best way to insert these snippets of code to fit the layout and navigation of the site.
If your message is not personalized, or if so you mdke a generic recipient in your list, you may be able to use the 'view as webpage' link to get the source code. Not sure if those links expire after X days or something though.I have never tried this or tested, but on most email sends there is a "view as webpage" link, maybe try taking one of these links and either hosting on your blog/site or using that link as a reference for your customers.
Using a PDF or screen shots is far from optimal as the content becomes an image and loses a lot of value.
Hope this helps.
for my company I am making a report in Xi3/Desktop Intelligence that pulls data via free hand SQL and makes a html file displaying the data, updating every 20mins. We want to incorporate a hit counter that will show us the number of times this report is being viewed.
I found a couple basic templates online. I tried copying and pasting them into a cell, but the output HTML page just displayed the full HTML (unrendered by my browser). I am decent at writing my own HTML, but I just do not understand how to stick my own HTML code in a dynamically updating report in Xi3.
Moreover, I doubt (for legality reasons) my company will be okay with me using a free hit counter template I find online, especially considering they all seem to reference a third party website to do the actual "counting." Any ideas of the best way to implement/learn how to create a visitor counter?
Thanks.
You can include HTML in a DeskI report. In the cell that contains the HTML, click Format Cell; on the "Number" tab, there is a checkbox for "Read as HTML". Make sure that's checked off. Note that you won't see the rendered HTML within DeskI, but it will display when viewed in Infoview.
How would I go about doing a full text search across a bunch of html files in an iOS application bundle? I need to have a lot of web content available offline and I need to be able to do a full text search across all of it. I feel like storing that content in a database will get a little bulky and slow things down significantly.
Thoughts?
--
Thanks,
Brandon
Do keep in mind that, even though it's a mobile device, the iPhone does have a fairly fast processor. All you're doing [said tongue-in-cheek] is searching text. These devices are built for video, music, and images.
In order of increasing amounts of coding on your part, you can:
Use a 3rd-party library (the only one I found is Locayta)
Port a non-Objective C search library (such as Lucene)
Store your HTML files in a database, and do a SQL search for any search text. Without a bunch of extra coding, this will really only work easily with exact matching on a single search term.
Manually load each file into the app and search the text using NSString's rangeOfString. Add features at will.
Build your own search engine, built off (at least) an index of terms. Start by trimming stop words, stem if you feel the need, decide if you want document relevance or not and possibly pursue vector space algorithms. Adding in autocorrect is probably beyond your app's focus, but nonetheless building your own text search engine would be a fast (run-time) way of providing multi-word search and a big bullet on your resume.
The above Title is my Manager's words, not mine. :)
This is a follow-up to a question that I posted previously. After reading my assessment on the impacts of converting Word Templates from PC to Mac, I have now been asked to investigate whether Word Templates can be replaced with a "Platform-independent Web-based solution" (her words, not mine). She has suggested using Adobe Forms (ie. Adobe Designer).
Personally, I think the only truly platform-independent web-based solution is text files or html forms. What do other people think?
It's called WordprocessingML (aka. WordXML, WordML)...
Overview of WordprocessingML [Word 2003 XML Reference] at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa212812(office.11).aspx.
MSDN Search for "WordML" at http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Search/en-US?query=WordML&ac=3
It could be called XForms...
The Web was suppose to be platform-independent electronic documents. In other words, if you truly want platform-independence, then I agree with you and your forms should be in HTML. Yet, HTML forms are really not a good development platform. That is why Adobe, Microsoft, and others provide "form" solutions. XForms is an attempt to make developing and using HTML forms more flexible, overcome its limitations, and provide a platform-independent object model for completing HTML forms. You might want to look at XForms at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/Forms/.
But, I wouldn't call it PDF
In my opinion, working with PDF files is difficult. I have not looked at the file format specification, but I heard it is not trivial. Moreover, you need a custom editor and you are locked into one vendor, which is Adobe. (Yet, there are other open-source and vendors who support the file format.) Adobe is not know for creating programs that are easy to use.
My Suggestion
If you are already using Word, then moving to WordML should be fairly easy. You can easily convert your existing Word documents into WordML by simply saving them as XML from the Save Dialog; therefore, you can automate this process through code. In addition, I believe WordML supports form templates (the actual form) and data documents (the actual data for a form).
It's called PDF...
At the core (and without the million of extra unnecessary features" that's exactly the niche that Adobe PDFs were designed to fill.
I'd suggest you look more into Adobe Acrobat Professional for more info. Although, I don't think there's any good way to directly convert Word docs to PDF format.
Note: This question should be moved to Super User since it's not really programming related
Google Docs meets those requirements of a Platform-independent Web-based solution. Your mileage will vary with Google Docs though - if you just want to use it for letters, it's good. Much beyond that, it's rather limited. Unless you get the Premier (read: Corporate) version which you have to pay for, you won't be able to programmatically fiddle with the templates.
If you want a "Platform-independent solution", go with ODF or OOXML. You can make either "web-based" to your hearts content - maybe with HTML5 or another solution such as Flash or Silverlight.
Are there any good alternatives to Adobe Acrobat for creating interactive PDFs? The terminology is a little fuzzy here - by interactive, I mean "able to be filled in", and not necessarily "scriptable". So this form would be for data collection, rather than report generation which seems to be the common scenario for pdf-related questions on SO.
The trick is that they need to be fillable using Adobe Reader. For those who have not experienced the many frustrations of Acrobat - by default, Reader cannot fill in a form unless it was created using Acrobat Pro >8.0 and has specifically enabled usage rights. That's fine and it basically works (except then Pro users can't save their data - WTF?).
Because I am getting frustrated, I would ideally like to avoid Adobe products altogether (that is on the design side, for the users Reader is still a necessity or I would just do it as a db-backed web form). I'm wondering if anyone has has good experiences with alternatives? Either software libraries or products?
Thanks!
EDIT - Thanks, matt b - I'd seen iText before but didn't know it could create forms. Unfortunately, it looks like Reader cannot save filled-in data to the forms generated by iText (or generated by OO Writer). I've got the nasty feeling that what I want is fundamentally impossible except using Adobe's own rights management tools. If there are other ideas. I'd love to hear them.
You can create fillable form PDFs using OpenOffice.org as well as LibreOffice.
To create the initial form elements in the *.odt documents, enable the View --> Toolbars --> Form Controls tools, which allow you to add clickable checkboxes + radiobuttons, fillable text fields, pushbuttons and some more to the page(s).
When you're finished with your document, use File --> Export as PDF with the checkbox Create PDF form enabled.
Now your PDF form will be editable (and saveable!) with any non-Adobe PDF viewer.
NOTE, however: Adobe uses an own proprietary way to create and fill PDF forms. Adobe Reader does only support to fill PDF forms which were created by an Adobe product (and which have been assigned 'extended rights' so Reader can indeed save the formdata alongside the document).
Adobe Reader will not work with PDF forms you created with OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice ('work' in the sense of: 'allows you to fill+save the form data'.). The technical mechanism behind this is that Adobe digitally sign their form documents with their own key (which is known to the Adobe Reader, and which you agreed to not reverse engineer when you accepted the Adobe Reader EULA...). --
This means:
Non-Adobe PDF Readers will not be able to 'fill+save' forms created with Adobe products (they can 'fill+print' them however).
Adobe PDF readers will refuse to 'fill+save' forms created with non-Adobe products (they will 'fill+print' them however).
The latter two points will be true for all the tools and utilities mentioned in the other answers to this question. If I'm mistaken here, please let me know in a comment...
iText is pretty much the standard in the java-world for generating PDF files programmatically. Perhaps it can also be used to create PDFs with forms in them as you would like?
The open source page layout tool Scribus has a bunch of features oriented to creating interactive PDF forms. I haven't personally used them, but they appear reasonably complete and are covered by the tutorial.
Scribus is worth knowing about if you ever need to do serious page layout in any case.
XSL FO is some thing we used to create PDF files out of existing form data. Unless you want the fillable pdf to be sent out the client, this is a valid option.
IText lets you create Annotations (there are essentially 3 types of 'interactive' components - forms (old style FDF and new XFA) and Annotations. Acrobat and lots of third party tools should let you modify the Annotations values.
There is also a DotNet version of IText called ISharp - both are freeand extremely powerful.
CutePDF Pro allows you to turn a PDF into an interactive form.
Foxit reader allows you to save any pdf with the filled in fields.
I recently dabbled with Scribus. I found it to be an excellent tool if one has enough time to configure and play around with it. I highly recommend it. Wufoo is also very good.
I am not a fan of Acrobat / Adobe. A software should make my life easier not challenge me at every step.
If you search the net with these keywords - FREE FORM CREATOR and you can add the word HTML5.
You will find an array of sites where you can log online and all your clients can have their separate login, fill in data and the form remains in the Cloud and declutter your hard drive. All stakeholders can access the form and edit at anytime. The account can be used as a folder for your business. These forms can be accessed on any device and any platform.
Many of these forms are HTML5 driven, they are so beautiful and fluid. Keep away from macros, they carry viruses.
www.homebasedofficeservices.com