Wrap-up week: E-text Editing

We've been making books and we would like to hear how accessible they are from your perspective, and what we can do differently to make them better.
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Wrap-up week: E-text Editing

Post by
leahbrochu
»
Tue Mar 27, 2018 9:37 am
Editing is of course the heart of our work for NNELS. As you have probably come to learn, there are many ways to do the work, and many different approaches that can all work successfully.
Can you provide some general comments on what you found that worked best for you? Specifically:
  • Did you come up with any workarounds for editing that worked really well or simplified the process? If so, what were they?
  • Did you try anything that did not work or that made things more confusing? If so, what were they?
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Re: Wrap-up week: E-text Editing

Post by
rmarion
»
Tue Mar 27, 2018 3:52 pm
As I didn’t have much experience using macros, I was not able to try the macro that was posted in the drop box to automate much of the early steps in the process. I dont’ think I really was able to develop any work arounds but did get quicker at preparing the documents for applying the new styles we needed to apply. I did find that when I tried to apply the NNELS template on the mac it did not change the font of the document but did add the NNELS style types to the file. So in the end I still had to apply the NNELS template to the document again when finishing the work in windows.

One thing I learned from my project buddy is that search and replace can be used for finding hidden formatting codes. This will be useful for me if I have the chance to work on document formatting and production again.
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Re: Wrap-up week: E-text Editing

Post by
ryano
»
Wed Mar 28, 2018 11:28 pm
• Did you come up with any workarounds for editing that worked really well or simplified the process? If so, what were they?
I find it really help when Rachel provide the task by steps make it easier for me to following and edit.

I mostly use menu from top of style pane etc as it is much easier for me to find what I am look for through the menu than icon.

Also the picture that was send by Rachel reall help me to identity what icon to look for while edit.
• Did you try anything that did not work or that made things more confusing? If so, what were they?
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Re: Wrap-up week: E-text Editing

Post by
ka.li
»
Thu Mar 29, 2018 2:00 pm
• Did you come up with any workarounds for editing that worked really well or simplified the process? If so, what were they?
Instead on trying to look at all the style changes in the EPub in a reader, I looked at the HTML code through accurate conversion to it and located the style changes in the book and determined what they were in a text editor for coding. I found this to be much more reliable because each EPub reader and different screen readers may behave differently when trying to get this type of info.
• Did you try anything that did not work or that made things more confusing? If so, what were they?
I tried deleting or stripping away specific things in Word but because Word tries to be smart, it sometimes ends up making a mess of things so I found it easier to strip everything away and add each thing back from the ground up without Word retaining any knowledge of the styles or other things that were in the document before. That's how I kept my documents clean.
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Re: Wrap-up week: E-text Editing

Post by
steve.murgaski
»
Fri Mar 30, 2018 7:22 am
Did you come up with any workarounds for editing that worked really well or simplified the process? If so, what were they?

I learned a lot about Word. The alt-f8 keystroke was a shortcut to get to the ever elusive styles organizer, and also gave access to macros. I didn't do as much with macros as I would have liked, but given more time I might have automated more things. I also discovered that I can add any command in Word to the Quick Access Toolbar, even if I don't know how to get to that command through the menus. So that was a relief.

Putting my screen reader in quick keys mode, in Word, was extremely helpful. Someone (Daniella?) pointed that out in the forums as a way to quickly jump to images by pressing the letter g. The keystroke for JAWS is jawskey+z; I know NVDA has a similar feature.

Did you try anything that did not work or that made things more confusing? If so, what were they?

I originally wanted to make a macro to handle the style removal and adding styles from the NNELS template. But I have the impression Microsoft is moving away from macros in preference for add-ins. There seemed to be no easy way of sharing a macro with others. So if I were trying to automate tasks in Word now I would start looking at doing it with an add-in.

This isn't related to book production, but I made a video of using Voice Dream Reader on an iPhone and learned a lot about that. The screen recorder feature in IOS won't capture VoiceOver speech, but you can cable the phone to a Mac and record its sound and video with QuickTime. Remember to turn screen curtain off though. It took me a day to figure out why the video was just black, and I felt like quite an idiot when I realized that it was correctly recording my blacked-out screen.
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Re: Wrap-up week: E-text Editing

Post by
Daniella.LP
»
Fri Mar 30, 2018 1:24 pm
The file I was working with is very large, even after removing some chapters. Word crashed my computer several times when I was working on some of the global edits (specifically clearing format and removing hyperlinks), so I resorted to selecting about 30 pages at once and performing those tasks only in those, before moving to the next block.

Having a reader that conveys accurate information about all the formatting in the epub is essential. I think that the biggest challenge is that there does not seem to be a way to see some of the format of the epub after converting it into other file types. The formatting changes to accommodate for the parameters of that software. For example, the heading levels that JAWS read in the .docx file was different from the html. I examined two html versions: one that I produced from the original epub using Pandoc, as well as unzipping the epub file (by changing the extension from epub to zip, and then opening the files within the .zip file. I could not find any of the block quotes either in the html or docx versions.

The book I was working with had several level four headings that were not formatted as headings; they appeared in bold text. But because I had first cleared all the format in Word, I could not find bold text. Also, many of the – that precede the name of an author after a block quote did not transfer to the .docx file at the time of conversion either; I could find some quotes by searching “–“ but not all of them.

I found that Word can be rather frustrating when it decides for the user. For example, I tackled the task of removing the decorative images globally. I found them, selected and replace them with three asterisks. I did not realize at that time that in many instances Word simply removed the asterisks, only when I was working in another task I saw they were missing. I assume that it saw them as misspellings, because the line disappeared entirely. I had not set Word to not autocorrect, this issue may be solved doing so.

Also, although for the most part the smaller images are decorative, there were a few instances of smallish images that I thought were decorative when they were not. This is another example of information that is nod conveyed by JAWS.

Some of the captions for images were read by JAWS as regular text, I did not know they were captions, their content did not make it apparent that they were not part of the regular text, but captions.

The images that are not decorative that go into the edited file need to be the original images from the epub. I could find the images within the epub by unzipping it and looking for them into the folder, but without sighted assistance I could not know what each of the .jpeg files was.

I learned a lot about Word and feel much more confident using it, especially with the help of JAWS Text Analyzer, as well as JAWS' skim reading capability (thanks Ka). I used many keyboard shortcuts and that made the process much simpler. I also learned to apply several styles in the style pane; some were hidden at first and so I could not find them when I pressed Control+Shift+S but when I checked the option to show all styles, and not only those in the document, I found them again and was able to apply them.

I also learned about wildcards, specifically "^$^p" to find headings without having to rely on the format. I plan to experiment more with wildcards, I am sure they will be useful in the future.

JAWS quick keys capability was very useful (Insert+Z) to find images with g, tables with t. After formatting the headings I could move through the Word document by headings (h) very easily.
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