508 strikes again!

I tried to write up a quick workflow diagram today detailing the workflow of my workplace. What a disaster. I'd like to state for the record that I love the 508 compliance rules and W3C, and I would love to see more private sites make their content more available--but boy oh boy, why are pdfs and ppts created so hard to tag?

The way workflow goes at my workplace is as such:

Researchers write papers in hopes of getting them published. These papers wind up sitting for a while, and in the mean time, other papers are written. These new papers site the unpublished waiting papers and then get published and posted to our site. To get them posted, the get sent to me for collection and organization into where on the site the are going. Then I send them to the web team. The web team really likes Word docs because they are easy to tag; sadly I don't get to send them a lot of Word, just pdfs and ppts. These typically do not pass 508 compliance and so must undergo rigorous testing and tagging before they can be put up, creating a lag in keeping the site current. Once they are compliant, a mock-up gets sent to me and we correct any errors, then the papers are up. Once these papers are up, the old unpublished ones are now published, making the references to "unpublished" works in the other papers outdated. I sigh heavily, and we might decide to go back and update the references--creating a new round of needing to make things compliant.

As you can imagine, the circularity of this workflow diagram was fun to look at. There were a lot of those finger looking delay symbols mentioned on the video in my guide, because I've got nothing but waiting when I need to request a paper from a researcher, send things to the web team, or wait for a decision on updating old references. Methinks I'm going to have a challenge creating a ROT policy given the current culture of citing unpublished works.