WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

PDF Readability for people with Moderate Low Vision

for

From: Wayne Dick
Date: Dec 1, 2009 5:00PM

My question is this: Suppose I'm reading
well structured tagged PDF. How can I
change the Font style, the letter, word
and line spacing, and font sizing at the
document element level (tag level). The
modifications are really necessary for
moderate low vision.

I am looking for help to make PDF
postings more readable to me, and people
like me with moderate low vision. That
disability group consists of
individuals with visual acuity of
(20/70-20/160). It is protect by 504,
508 and the ADA.

Most of us don't use screen readers
unless it is the only option, and the
page modifications provided by zoom
technologies are to disruptive to the
page flow. The best accommodation is a
restructured typography that may or may
not be accompanied by text-to-speech.

Does anyone know how this disability
group can be served with PDF? These
changes are easily obtained with doc,
docx, rtf and odt as well as HTML and
other w3c markup languages.

I don't need advice about which
assistive technologies to use. I'm a
computer science professor and I've
tried every major assistive technology.
I haven't one that is deterministic
and will give me the typographic changes
I need for effective reading PDF.

Please contact me with any techniques
(that don't involve AI).

You may contact me directly
<EMAIL REMOVED> or reply on the list.

Wayne Dick