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Re: PDF Accessibility

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Jan 20, 2010 6:36AM

Geof,

I do not believe that it is hopeless, but authors are still learning about accessibility and not just for PDF. You don't need to look far to find issues with access to HTML content either, although the proliferation of tools that author acceptably accessible HTML occurred earlier than the proliferation of tools that author acceptably accessible PDF so there is an abundance of PDF documents out there that need work to bring them up to an appropriate level.

I do believe that if the author of the SSA document at http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/documents/ssa/SSA_Guide_to_Accessible_PDF_Documents_and_Forms.pdf#4 simply republished the original word document with the latest version of Acrobat that the document issues that we're seeing would be addressed. Or, the author could modify the rolemap and mark the document as tagged PDF (it has tags but the document flag that says that it is tagged was un-set) and it would be much better. I'll let a contact at the SSA know...

Regarding your comment about making the conversion process better, I believe that we have and will continue to do so. The document in question was published three and a half years ago with older tools and there are improvements since then that would help. There's more to do, and I can assure you that Karen McCall's claim that she tells us about issues is accurate and we value her feedback and encourage others to let us know when you have issues or ideas.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick

Senior Product Manager, Accessibility

Adobe Systems

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