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Re: Foxit is ending "upfront payment" and moving to subscription

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From: chagnon@pubcom.com
Date: Dec 12, 2023 8:51AM

Having been in many top-level meetings with some of the corporations behind our accessibility tools, their goal is to make money for the investors (both the private equity investment firms and public stockholders).

They see government laws that mandate accessibility and figure out ways to force us to pay their companies to meet the law. They charge for their software tools, as well as their cloud services to fix our PDFs.

If we do the math:
4 million US federal employees
12 million federal contractors
3.6 million secondary education employees

Total: around 20 million people in the US are required to meet our Sec. 508 accessibility or education laws.

Add in the number of state/local government employees, local school districts, as well as those in other countries and you have a humongous number of people making many PDFs every day of their work lives. A rough estimate is 1 billion PDF pages are made each day by this group alone.

Even if these companies charged just $1 per PDF page for their tools, that's potentially 300 billion dollars in revenue each year for the corporate investors to divvy up.

Why would they fix this mess?

What we need to do is fund nonprofits to develop our daily software tools, including word processors and PDF tools. Similar to what we have with NVDA screen reader. Remove the financial incentive (money, money, and more money) and put the technology into the public domain.

We'd have a chance of getting some equity for people with disabilities.

NOTE: Many in government can't use software/technology developed by certain countries. Foxit Software is a Chinese-owned company with a US-based subsidiary. See https://markets.ft.com/data/equities/tearsheet/profile?sh8095:SHH Also note that FoxIt is a member of the PDF Association and has members on the association's board, as well as in various PDF committees.

—Bevi
(putting my MBA to work)
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Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | <EMAIL REMOVED>
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PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing
consulting • training • development • design • sec. 508 services
Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes
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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Philip Kiff
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2023 9:08 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Foxit is ending "upfront payment" and moving to subscription

Thanks for the helpful heads up, Karen.

The cost of tools for working with PDFs are a real barrier to accessibility. We've been able to create inaccessible PDFs for free for decades now using hundreds of different software programs, but to create an accessible PDF somehow seems to get more and more expensive every year.

Phil.

On 2023-12-11 8:54 a.m., Karen McCall wrote:
> Morning!
> For those who use Foxit for PDFs, I got an e-mail from Foxit this weekend stating that, as of "now", they are ending the "upfront payments" or single payment option for Foxit.
> The subscription price starts at $18.99 per month CAD. At least I think it's CAD. It might be USD.
> Just a heads-up for those who switched to Foxit to save money. Not so much anymore!
> There is no indication that our stand-alone/single purchase versions will expire, but I imagine there won't be any updates.
> Do not switch to Kofax PowerPDF to try and save money. It is the worst of the 3 in terms of tagging capability. Even taking a well-structured Word document, the results are only P, Figure and some table tags. It is not a viable alternative.
> Cheers, Karen