I've got an asp website that currently has students copying and pasting from Word into a textarea and submitting a paper that way. In this case, they can't do any formatting.
Instructors pull up the students' work and apply html spans and styles to it as commentary.
We've thought about going to a system where the student uploads a Word doc and the instructor makes comments within the doc and uploads it back for the student to view.
Would it make more sense to keep the system as a paste operation and maybe provide some markdown or rich text controls? I'm wondering about compatibility/virus/formatting/size issues with Word making it difficult to upload/download/store.
Yeah - this is a design question.. ;)
As a users I can tell you that it's easier to have Word upload feature. Copy and paste is a little of trouble and users tend to want it the easy ways.
On the other side, instructors are also your users, so what I would do for the instructors is create web-based application that parse out Word document to a WYSIWYG rich text editor for editing or make commentary. In addition, instructors also have option to download the Word document and edit them on local computer and upload it back to your application.
It's a little of work but I am sure both users (students and instructors) would like it. You can start by working on students' Word upload feature and move on to insturctors'.
If you worry about formatting and compatibility of Word, from my experience, if the code parse the Word document right you should not have formatting and compatibility issues.
Related
I want to provide some very simple content to the user that describes how to use a web form.
This text could just as easily be written in HTML, however, convention among the content writers is to write all help text in Word, convert it to PDF, and then put a link to the PDF at the top of the web application.
Assuming that the PDFs are tagged and/or 508 compliant, does this practice present any accessibility concerns?
There are two issues posed with your question:
(1) PDF when it could be HTML
This requires the user to have software that reads PDF format.
This requires the PDF to be tagged and made accessible.
This interferes with usability and is problematic for some users, especially on mobile where the focus switch to a different (PDF reader) application looses focus on your web page or web browser.
(2) "breaking" accessibility
The accessibility of your web content is evaluated on its own merits: you certainly can have an accessible PDF but if your reasoning is your HTML does not need to be accessible because of that, you are not accessible and fail your end-users.
There is also a hidden use-case for accessibility or usability you might not consider: web crawlers and indexing. Users rely on web searching to find content and your PDF is not indexed to map to your web page content in most search engines, so users will not find the help they need.
Most reasonable people involved with Section 508 would likely agree it is not accessible, as it fails 1194.22(n): When electronic forms are designed to be completed on-line, the form shall allow people using assistive technology to access the information, field elements, and functionality required for completion and submission of the form, including all directions and cues.
ยง1194.22 Web-based intranet and internet information and applications
It is possible to convert Word content to HTML, and you are always highly encouraged to write the content as web content, because there are sometimes issues we simply accessing, and opening PDFs depending on the device they are using.
But to answer your question: no, as long as your PDF is accessible. I'd suggest putting it through something like the accessibility audit tool if you have Adobe Acrobat. If you don't, you might give content creators a simple check list, such as:
does your image have alt text if needed? (consider a decision tree/flowchart, example)
are your headings marked properly using the built-in styles?
are your tables formatted correctly? also tables are not used for layout
You'll probably notice these are typical guidelines when writing web content, but also apply to documents (Word, pdf, etc.).
WCAG has a list of PDF Techniques that you also want to check, but generally if you make sure that everything is tagged/styled/marked properly in Word, it should save to PDF with the correct tags and such.
I'd like to set up a CMS that allows clients to generate a PDF brochure from a series of text inputs and text areas (rich text editor). Clients would fill out text inputs and then select (via a check box) which contents should appear in the exported PDF. This would then stitch together a PDF brochure containing pages only applicable to the options chosen by the client.
All the content is in a CMS with web pages and pdfs built on the fly as per the client's choices. A change in the content is then reflected immediately in the published docs meaning no redundant, out of date pdfs and the benefit of all the tools within the CMS (workflow, publishing dates, security, etc).
Does anyone know of any tools that do this?
Appreciate any help.
well your question require a lot of work to be done. I had similar requirement and what i have done i can brief here. I created multiple views which lets me select their columns and i have used my own rules for differentiating columns from test like {view.columnname}. when your save all information i have used itextsharp for pdf generation.
There is plenty of information on itextsharp.
You might be able to do this with design tools and reporting software, plugged into your CMS of choice. For example, you could use Wordpress, and then design your PDF output using iReport, and run it with Jasper. You'd have to work on the bit to translate user inputs to a query passed to the report, but that shouldn't be too much work.
One issue is that, regardless of the work you put into the design, when you attempt to share it, it wont look like a brochure at all, only sequential single page PDFs. As an alternative I found a website where you can upload or design your brochure, it can then be downloaded and shared as a flippable, digital brochure. If you are interested check out https://simplebooklet.com/learn/animated-tri-folds.php
Suppose you're developing a web site and blind users will be a significant chunk of your target market. If the web site includes document editing functionality, what would be appropriate WYSIWYM tools? Are languages like Markdown, Textile and Wiki Formatting really accessible or are they inconvenient to blind users?
I'm a blind programmer and while I haven't used most of the languages you mention I've found that any markdown language is fairly easy to use if you have the desire to learn it. I've had no problem using either HTML or several markup languages for wiki's. Part of it will depend on how invested the users are in your site. If it's a site that will be visited infrequently or for short periods of time, it's much less likely that a user will take the time to learn the required markup whether they are blind or not. Unfortunately, I have not found an accessible JavaScript WYSIWYG editor but I find it easier to manually enter the markup so haven't looked very hard.
the first question is: how important is semantic structure? could you get away with plain text. You could do simple parsing like treating blank lines as paragraph markers, treating a series of lines which begin with * as a bulleted list, identify URLs and make them into links, etc.
As a blind developer myself, I have no problem in understanding languages like Markdown. But if it's a syntax I'm unfamiliar with, I'll only learn it if I expect to use the site very often, or care deeply about the content.
Two final thoughts come to mind: while I certainly experience some accessibility challenges using TinyMCE, you could develop something much simpler - provide less than 10 formatting options, like inserting hyperlinks, making lists, centering text, setting the style (such as heading) etc.
And lastly, when I talk to non-technical blind people, they often just write their content in Word and paste into a wiki or blog post. This sounded strange when I first heard it, but it does make sense. So an ideal solution would accept pasted in content.
In closing - it depends how important this is, and how much effort you want to expend. Maybe a Markdown editor with a live preview (like on this site), buttons for inserting simple formatting like URLs, and the ability to paste in rich text would tick all boxes :-)
On a web page, the most accessible embedded text editor for blind users is one that uses standard HTML, such as a <textarea> element, with a corresponding <label> element:
<label for="editor">Enter your text here using wiki markup:</label>
<textarea id="editor"></textarea>
If a WYSIWYM tool is built using standard accessible HTML, then blind users can easily enter text into it, with full confidence that they're entering text in the right place. Then the question becomes: Which is the better markup language? They all require memorization, but some may be more intuitive than others. One way to find out which is best would be to do some usability testing with a wide variety of target users. Also be sure to providing easy, accessible access to syntax help.
Picture yourself working in pure text 80x4 display (just open a console and resize appropriately), then use vi/emacs/ed and you'll soon realize what markup will get in the way.
Try to do as much work as possible to understand plain text, else use light markup like POD, finally things like AsciiDoc are very powerful but needs training.
I don't know about WYSIWYG/WYSIWYM tools, but I do know that complying with W3C standards (especially their HTML5 en CSS3 drafts) while writing your own editor code will help a lot.
In CSS you can specify speed and intonation of speech. In HTML you can specify alternative text (alt attribute in many elements) that screen readers are compatible with. Be sure to know when to use the abbr and the acronym elements. Use the former when you want the screen reader to read the meaning of an abbreviation and the latter when the acronym should be read as a word (e.g. ASAP, NATO and OS).
For the editor itself, I recommend creating a WYSIWYG editor that uses divs and spans. Screen readers will understand easily the structure of a document. For the current line, use a text box; for every other line that's not being edited, convert the contents immediately to valid HTML.
If you find a good tool, be sure to post it here. I'm looking for one too. :-)
I realise this question has been asked many times before but a lot of them are old now without an answer.
I have a need for users to be able to edit word documents from my web page.
Are there any editors, or components, that will allow me to do this?
A bit of background, the user will be able to upload a word document to my site and then view/edit it from there. There will be no requirement for the user to download the document again but ideally I'd like to keep the document as a word doc at my end.
Cheers
A little pricey, but the .NET Server version of TX Text Control allows editing of .doc and .docx documents within a browser. (I have the standalone .NET Pro version.)
Here's a much cheaper one: Cute Editor, but I have never used it.
Well, you can do what you want with the OpenXML SDK and some XSLT (you can convert to/from docx or WordML to html) but it's not easy, and you'd have a great deal of difficulty retaining fidelity if you have much more than very simple documents.
My users upload Word 2007 documents to our site and I'd like to load them into a rich edit control of some kind so the users can make modifications/ comment, etc.
What mechanisms are available to:
load the Word document via ASP.NET, and
parse/format/display the document in a rich editing control?
Also, what kinds of rich editing controls are best to use in this circumstance?
I believe that telerik's Rad Editor supports the ability to paste from word.
From the site:
Seven Ways for Pasting from Word
Telerik ASP.NET Editor offers a number of features that help the user paste formatted content from Microsoft Word and other applications, and apply different types of format stripping:
Strip Word-formatting on paste Strip
Word-formatting on paste (cleaning fonts and sizes)
Forced format
stripping on Paste Word Content in
Clipboard Interception Strip
Word-formatting after paste Paste
plain text Paste as HTML
Here is the demo
Try TEEdit. It is great for doc and docx files. Allows for save and open buttons too...
For display Word document, this is an intresting project using combination of Silverlight and OpenXML, worth having a look
http://openxmldeveloper.org/articles/TextGlow.aspx
For editing, it will be more complex. Currently there are editors out there like CKEditor, TinyMCE, but they are mainly used for editing rich text but not as natural when it comes to handling document like word that has very rich page layout and device bound are support.