In the previous section, techniques for improving Word file accessibility were presented. At this point, you have two options of publishing documents to the Web:
This page examines each of these options and discusses the accessibility issues the different approaches raise.
The first option for publishing a Word document to the Web is to upload it to the website you want it available. Once uploaded, you can create a link to the document that will either download to their computer or open within the browser when selected.
The central problem to this approach is that if the user does not have the correct version of Microsoft Word installed on their computer, the document cannot be opened. All of the content is hidden from the user, and is therefore completely inaccessible. While the Microsoft Word viewer plug-in can open the Word document and allow the user to view the document, if the user does not have this plug-in or is working on a non-compatible platform such as Macintosh or Linux, then they will not be able to view the document.
Therefore, if you are uploading a Word document to a website, you must ensure that your users have the right version of the Word program correctly installed or provide the document in an alternate format.
Even if you are certain that all of your viewers have Microsoft Word installed, you must consider download time. Word documents in their native format (i.e. '.doc' files) can be up to four times as large as the same document in a web format (i.e. HTML). On a high-speed Internet connection, this size difference may not seem to matter, but for students downloading a document from a dial-up Internet connection, the resulting slow download time can be problematic. The larger the file, the longer it takes to download.
The next page will discuss the second option of publishing documents to the Web using the "Save as Web Page" feature in Microsoft Word.
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