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Re: PDF Accessibility

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From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Jan 20, 2010 2:39PM

What are your thoughts on the new e-book format from Kurzweil for the
KNFB reader?

I believe we have a fundamental conflict with PDF accessibility on two
fronts. One is that the tool has benn marketed, and is seen as an easy
tool to distribute "stuff". Two, doing typesetting to distribute
electronic information used to be considered a specialized skill, but
now we expect document authors to do it as part of normal business.
Writing content and "programming" for accessibility are not the same
skill sets in any way in my view, and asking the general writing author
to do both seems like a very steep uphill battle to me. Aids like
CommonLook and PAW, Microsoft's new accessibility checker, etc, are in
the right direction, and need to be taken further. Getting to the
"spellcheck" point is probably not feasible, but ensuring formats are
able to store sufficient amount of accessibility-related data, and then
finding easy ways to make most of that transparent to content authors is
something that needs to be raised on the authoring tool
developers/vendors priority lists.