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Cont: Dear Users… (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people) Part 11

catsmate said:
I could introduce you to some people at Inclusion and Accessibility Labs.......
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Yep, I did an entire course on it years ago.

The hard part is that you have to take accessibility into account when you are developing your source document. You can't take a non-accessible document, run it through Kofax and suddenly it becomes accessible. Accessibility has to be part of the design at every stage.

Not enough people think about design in their documents in the first place. Hit the ¶ button in your average Word document and see how many people use spaces to shift text. *shudder*
 
Most pdfs can be saved as word documents or easily OCRed pretty cleanly. I hate scanned documents with a real fervor. I’ll run a crap OCR on them and leave all the artifacts of the scan for them to clean up when I send back my redlines.
 
arthwollipot said:
Yep, I did an entire course on it years ago.

The hard part is that you have to take accessibility into account when you are developing your source document. You can't take a non-accessible document, run it through Kofax and suddenly it becomes accessible. Accessibility has to be part of the design at every stage.

Not enough people think about design in their documents in the first place. Hit the ¶ button in your average Word document and see how many people use spaces to shift text. *shudder*
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:D :thumbsup:
 
Something that still flabbergasts me at work is that people want to include data in a table format in a report but don't think to actually create a table. It's just random tabs and white space.
 
malbui said:
Something that still flabbergasts me at work is that people want to include data in a table format in a report but don't think to actually create a table. It's just random tabs and white space.
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Or format the data in a spreadsheet and paste it in.
 
malbui said:
Something that still flabbergasts me at work is that people want to include data in a table format in a report but don't think to actually create a table. It's just random tabs and white space.
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I remember an old call I got at the university helpdesk.... 30 years ago?

The receptionist/admin for the sports department needed some help with... something. So went over and took a look.

It appeared to be a couple years worth of data that was being tracked and calculated using a spreadsheet. Except they weren't using a spreadsheet app, it was all inside a WordPerfect document. I guess WP tables had some amount of calculations they could do. Tried and tried to get her to move it to Excel. Didn't want to bother. I think a student managed to find some problem and got it moving again. *shudder*
 
malbui said:
Something that still flabbergasts me at work is that people want to include data in a table format in a report but don't think to actually create a table. It's just random tabs and white space.
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catsmate said:
Or format the data in a spreadsheet and paste it in.
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People who learned to write using pen and paper often have difficulty appreciating that a word processing program "thinks" differently than a person. A person starts with a sheet of paper and adds things to it. A word processor wants the user to actively define the page (margins, headers, and footers,) then define paragraphs using styles. For a simple document that's a fair bit of work, although most word processors today have default templates that will set up a decent set of styles for you.

Styles are powerful: you can easily change the look of an entire document by changing the base style to use a different font, line-height, or margins. Or change the layout from block paragraphs with an empty line between them to indented paragraphs with no empty line. But unless they've specifically learned that, either by reading the manual (yikes!) or taking a course, they won't even know that functionality exists.

I'm unsure how many of these concepts are covered in school today. That seems to be the place to introduce these, starting with 12 to 14 year old students.

Much of the above applies to web pages, too: HTML contains the content while CSS tells the browser how to present that content. And don't get me started on how horribly mangled is the HTML generated by both MS Word and LibreOffice Writer.
 
Blue Mountain said:
People who learned to write using pen and paper often have difficulty appreciating that a word processing program "thinks" differently than a person. A person starts with a sheet of paper and adds things to it. A word processor wants the user to actively define the page (margins, headers, and footers,) then define paragraphs using styles. For a simple document that's a fair bit of work, although most word processors today have default templates that will set up a decent set of styles for you.

Styles are powerful: you can easily change the look of an entire document by changing the base style to use a different font, line-height, or margins. Or change the layout from block paragraphs with an empty line between them to indented paragraphs with no empty line. But unless they've specifically learned that, either by reading the manual (yikes!) or taking a course, they won't even know that functionality exists.

I'm unsure how many of these concepts are covered in school today. That seems to be the place to introduce these, starting with 12 to 14 year old students.

Much of the above applies to web pages, too: HTML contains the content while CSS tells the browser how to present that content. And don't get me started on how horribly mangled is the HTML generated by both MS Word and LibreOffice Writer.
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arthwollipot said:
Things I Wish More People Knew #8967: Styles.
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That's why I developed a few templates with my favoured styles embedded. I've been using them for years.

Norman Alexander said:
technically, it IS a database. A really, REALLY simple, dumb, feature-free database. But even so...
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:thumbsup:
arthwollipot said:
You are technically correct, which as we all know is the best kind of correct...
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:thumbsup: :D
 
Blue Mountain said:
But does anyone know what a card catalogue is these days? Or a Rolodex? Or cuneiform tablets?
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In one of the preliminary chapters of my PhD thesis, many years ago, I discussed how the custodians of the great libraries of antiquity managed their data and metadata. It was really fascinating stuff, for me at least.
 
malbui said:
In one of the preliminary chapters of my PhD thesis, many years ago, I discussed how the custodians of the great libraries of antiquity managed their data and metadata. It was really fascinating stuff, for me at least.
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That does sound fascinating, if you're into that kind of thing.

I have come to learn over the last fifty plus years of my existence on this planet that there are no subjects that are inherently uninteresting. Everything is interesting to someone. And if you look hard, you can sometimes see what it is that they find interesting.
 
arthwollipot said:
That does sound fascinating, if you're into that kind of thing.

I have come to learn over the last fifty plus years of my existence on this planet that there are no subjects that are inherently uninteresting. Everything is interesting to someone. And if you look hard, you can sometimes see what it is that they find interesting.
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Over the years I've done a lot of travelling and I've always made a point of going to museums and galleries and concerts and exhibitions and conferences wherever I've been. It's very unusual for me to emerge without my thoughts going in new directions and without a reading and/or listening list.
 
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