ictsan

Microsoft Word’s document format; .doc seems to be something a standard in the creating of accessible documents – large print books, DAISY Books and books in MS Reader format. I have just made a large print books of “The Great Gatsby” for a pupil and here’s how I did it.

I visited wikipedia – www.wikipedia.org and entered the title of book. At the bottom of the page there was a reference to Gutenbery Project Australia, where I could view the whole text. I went for the text version.

Tip 1 – I press CTRL + A the CTRL + C to copy the text onto the clipboard. Then I load up MS Word. In my new document. I do not just paste the text, I use Paste Special and paste just plain text. Any graphics caught up the selection just get stripped out before the text is pasted into your document. Usually if you copy and paste froma webpage, Word copies the underlying html web code as well!

Tip 2 - Make sure that you have continuous text, not text with a line freed (LF) or carriage return (CR) at the end of a line. You can check by clicking on the show/hide paragraph symbol tool. It’s a backwards P. If this shows you a paragraph symbol at the end of each line, then you need to get rid of them – unless this work is in verse format. You need to know that the paragraph symbol is represented within Word by “^p” (caret, lower case p). So you could  search for “^p” and replace it with a space. Except then you’d have no paragraphs at all! So I replace two paragraphs (”^p^p”) with an unusual symbol say “~” tilde. I then replace the remaining single paragraphs with a space. I reinstate the tildes (”~”) with two paragraphs – “^p^p”. This is long winded but it works. If there is an easier way I’d love to know.

Tip 3 If you are making a large print book control the margins by going to the menu; File-> Page Setup-> Margins.
Reduce the upper and lover margins to as little as .5 cm and the left and right ones to 1.5 cm or less if your method of binding can take it. You should reduce the number of pages in the book quite substantially

Tip 4 Use Styles for the fonts; Choose your font size for this work. Do not, however mark the whole text and then change the font size in the menu at the top of the screen. This is a big mistake and nearly eveyone does it it because so few people have been shown how to use styles.

You need to use the Format -> Styles and Formatting tool. This appears at the right of your document. If you have pasted in plain text, then you should see just a few styles there including; Normal, Heading 1, Heading 2. You need to click on Normal – the style for the main body of the text and Modify the style. Change its format; change font size to say 20 pt Tahoma.

Now Modify the style – Heading 2 to say Arial Bold 20 pt. Modify Heading 1 to, say, Arial Bold 24pt

Find each chapter heading, click in the text – Chapter 1- and click on the style at the right; Heading 2.  You can find each occurence of the word chapter – usually at the start of a chapter and make sure that it is set to Heading 2.

Set the Title of the book to Heading 1.

If you use styles like this, you can easily change the whole of the body text size for a pupil who requires a larger size, by going back and Modifying the font size. There is another advantage. It is very easy to create an index called a table of contents. I’m running out of time to explain this, but here’s a clue.

Tip 5 After setting the section and chaper headings – using Headings 1, 2 and 3, use the menu item; insert-> Reference-> Index and tables…..> Table of contents. It usally enough to click on OK and you have an Index! If you change the font size or other formatting, this index will be out of date and you’ll have to renew it.

If you want to create an e-book to be read by a  person with access difficulties using MS Reader, you have done most of the hard work already.

This is how I do it and I think that using thiese methods will save time in the future if the docu,mets need to be used by other pupils in a slightly differnt format. If I have made any errors, please let me know.

Tip 6 Oh, do not forget to add your copyright notice to the new accessible book – more on this in a later post

This entry was posted on August 21, 2008 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Accessibility, Books for All, Copyright, Documentation, Visual Impairment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.