When using Microsoft Word or Google Docs, don't just make text bigger and bolder to make it a heading. That will work for sighted users, but screen reader users will miss that and just hear it as normal paragraph text. Use actual heading styles, like level 1 through 6.
@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz@A11yAwareness yes, this. It'd be so cool if word processors had fully semantic interfaces rather than an unholy jumble of ad hoc and semantic styling that prevails today... It would benefit anyone trying to automatically parse documents. As it is, almost nobody realises they're creating poorly structured documents.
@lightweight @A11yAwareness What makes things worse is that even if you want to do it correctly, especially Word makes it unreasonably difficult to do so because every time you dare to paste anything into the document you have no idea what the styling is.
Brought to you by "Oh, this must be a header 1, it looks ljust like the others. Nope, it's a header 2 that has been manually styled", and other bestsellers.
@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz@loke yup. It's not the sort of software I use... @A11yAwareness
@lightweight @loke @A11yAwareness Although to be fair, it's not a Word-specific problem, it's the way that people have a goal in mind and hunt for any way to get there, as soon as they find any route that's the one they stick with.
For some reason wordprocessors in general make "choose a font, size, bold, italic" really encouragingly obvious, so that's what people use.
That's because the goal of the software is not to "make a structured document", it's "make something that OK on paper" ...
@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz@yojimbo yup, agreed. Wordprocessors are widely misused - the wrong tool for the job in most contexts in which they're used. @loke @A11yAwareness
@yojimbo @lightweight @A11yAwareness
For some reason wordprocessors in general make "choose a font, size, bold, italic" really encouragingly obvious, so that's what people use.
This is the most important point, I think. Especially Word makes it unreasonably hard to do the right thing. So hard in fact, that even though I get frustrated when people working on the same document screws things up, I cannot be angry with them, because the tool literally leads you by the hand down the incorrect path.
@loke @lightweight @A11yAwareness I went from text terminals to SGI, using FrameMaker. Just about the time that Macintosh came out, and so many students were queuing up to type their work out on those, and there was me with three machines all to my self because ... well, I don't know. Perhaps they all thought unix was "difficult" somehow. All I knew was that I was writing with a lot of structure and a lot of layout options (that I quickly learned to not use because simplicity is better), on machines that were more available. Structuring text means I got automatic tables of contents which was a huge timesaver. Never looked back!
@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz@yojimbo I also had the benefit of an SGI as a postgrad... would've gladly done my thesis with Latex or Scribus (both typesetting/publishing systems, both #libre) but I was in Seattle, so I used MS Word + Canvas (for the diagrammes) What a horrible experience. Always disliked Adobe almost as much as Microsoft. Cool thing is, anyone can create amazing, structured documents either with Markdown or a full-blown graphical interface without compromising or paying big $$. @loke @A11yAwareness
@lightweight @loke @A11yAwareness When I was using FrameMaker it was before Adobe had bought it 
However, if that hadn't been available, I'd have had to go all-in on TeX, which ... well, I'm not sure that would have been a bad thing! LaTeX existed, but I hadn't heard of it at the time. pic would have been hard work though.
@lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz@yojimbo I think Scribus seldom gets enough attention either. It's quite industrial strength and, even though I haven't used it in anger, I folks I trust (like @lightshow) have always spoken very highly of it. http://www.scribus.us/ - this is interesting: https://www.techradar.com/reviews/scribus @loke @A11yAwareness
@loke @yojimbo @lightweight @A11yAwareness
I prefer to use LyX which gives you the power of TeX/LaTeX in a graphical interface. The interface is different enough to break bad word processing habits, but once you learn to use it, you wonder why you ever put up with a bad word processor, like MS Word.
@vik@mastodon.nzoss.nz@yojimbo I liked the old PCW "Joyce" since which most word processors have looked cartoonish. @lightweight @loke @A11yAwareness