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Re: PDF Accessibility

for

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.




-----Original Message-----
From: Karlen Communications [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Wednesday, January 20, 2010 8:02 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PDF Accessibility

My approach as someone who uses a screen reader is that if I don't use
it
and provide feedback....like we are doing here...Adobe or other
developers
won't know or understand what needs to be fixed or added or repaired to
a
document format to make it accessible for everyone.

PDF is not going to go away and any help I can provide in making it more
usable for those of us who encounter it on a daily basis is my goal.

I have books I've written and sell as tagged PDF that worked perfectly
in
Acrobat and Reader 7 and 8 but both Window-Eyes and JAWS have problems
with
in 9. Adobe knows this but if I hadn't provided them with this type of
feedback they couldn't work on it for the next iteration of their
products
or improve the tagging of documents so that it gets to the "just as
accessible as Word" that people ask for and expect. [I know, there are
some
horrid Word documents out there but the measure seems to be "as
accessible
as Word."]

I am equally frustrated with some of the PDF documents I have to read or
repair. But if we don't provide the feedback on what is and isn't
working,
how will the format evolve and how will document designers and authors
know
what they need to do to create better documents?

I guess this has just been part of "my workflow" since we've been able
to
Tag PDF documents.

I also want to produce my books in an accessible format. DAISY doesn't
let
me include complex formatting for content when I am trying to
demonstrate
formatting in an Office document. A license to provide full text and
audio
DAISY in MP3 format is expensive. A license for synthesized voices for
DAISY
to have full text and audio is expensive. Print is too expensive and not
terribly accessible for people using a screen reader. Word does not
provide
a secure format to distribute my material. PDF offers me the ability to
have
a secure document that is accessible.

I struggle with these issues and try to find the best and most
accessible
and secure method of delivering content.

I've been following the eBook evolution with interest but so far none of
the
eBook readers are looking at full accessibility of content and device so
I
come back to PDF.


So I will help in whatever way I can to improve accessibility to
PDF...even
if at times it is painful to try to access.

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Geof Collis
Sent: January-20-10 7:31 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PDF Accessibility

I have to ask who are people making pdf's accessible for? I've been
trying to like them but as far as I am concerned it is hopeless.

I have the latest technology and still I cannot read them any better
than I could with my old technology, I only open them in hopes that
one day I will be able to read them effortlessly but that is just not
happening so I fall back to my usual plan and that is to ask them to
be converted to a more accessible format, so I ask why bother in the
first place, I'm sure I'm not the only one doing this.

We have legislation that gives me this option so perhaps Adobe would
do better to make the conversion process better, you cant force
people to drive cars they dont like so why do it with documentation.

cheers

Geof






At 09:16 PM 1/19/2010, you wrote:
>Andrew,
>
>When I downloaded the file (save file as) onto my computer and opened
it
>with Acrobat 9 professional it looked like it had tags as well -- not
very
>useful tags, but tags nonetheless. I went through about 10 pages and
tagged
>it -- it's pretty straightforward, if I'm doing it correctly.
>
>Here is the link I used:
>http://www.usa.gov/webcontent/documents/ssa/SSA_Guide_to_Accessible_PDF
_Doc
uments_and_Forms.pdf#4
>
>I didn't realize that Acrobat and reader added tags automatically but
>weren't permanent etc. There is a lot out there about Acrobat that is
not
>well known. Can you talk more about that, Andrew?
>
>I'm co-presenting a talk about PDFs & accessibility on Saturday and am
going
>to mention this discussion.
>
>Dona
>cedarwaxwing on twitter
>http://accessdp.wordpress.org
>
>On Tue, Jan 19, 2010 at 6:41 PM, Andrew Kirkpatrick
< <EMAIL REMOVED> >wrote:
>
> > No, unless I'm looking at a different document, it isn't tagged.
Acrobat
> > and Reader will add tags automatically, but they are not permanent
and
will
> > lack image equivalents and likely have inconsistent semantics.
> >
> > Steve, what URL are you using that you're seeing a tagged file?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > AWK
> >
> > Andrew Kirkpatrick
> >
> > Senior Product Manager, Accessibility
> >
> > Adobe Systems
> >
> > <EMAIL REMOVED>
> >
> >
> >
>