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Re: PDF Readability for people with Moderate Low Vision

for

From: Wayne Dick
Date: Dec 2, 2009 12:45AM

Thank You Andrew and Tony,

I'll take this over to the Adobe
Accessibility discussion board.

To answer the question of zoom at the
element level, space is the biggest
priority in large print typography.
When you live in the small print world
you can afford extra large headings and
other reading cues. We need other
markers: borders, color differences for
those who can see color etc. When you
live in a large print world, size is a
poor marker for element type. The large
print reader still needs the document
semantics of tags, they just need other
markers.

This means the paragraph / normal text
font must be larger, but other text
elements will not be much bigger or
smaller. If we can restyle content at
the element level we can use other style
modifications to visual document navigation.

Example: I have my students turn in
their assignments in Word compatible
formats. They must use appropriate
style markup: normal, heading 1, .... I
read their papers into my template and I
can grade in my own optimized visual
mode. Save the same Word format file in
PDF, it will be well structured, but I
may not be able to get a faithful
reconstruction.

I just think Adobe has done such a great
job with tags and mark up, that there
must be a way to program this last step.
Anyway that is my hope.


Wayne