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Re: PDF accessibility

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Feb 12, 2010 9:24AM

Monir,
To expand on your second paragraph... I generally agree that tagging is a necessary condition for accessibility, but I'd make a small modification to say that for all but the simplest of documents tagging is a necessary condition for accessibility.

Since Reader does do tagging automatically for untagged documents, if you have a very simple document containing just a few paragraphs of plain text (I'm not suggesting that PDF is the best format for this, just that people do this) then the tags that Reader automatically generates will be sufficient. If you have additional structure in the document such as headings, lists, or tables then it is less likely that the tagging heuristic will be sufficient without further author input, and if you have images that need equivalents then you certainly won't get that in the auto-tagging process.

I completely agree that to be certain that authors should provide tagging. I'm raising this point because I often hear people say that without tags a PDF document is completely inaccessible and this is not completely accurate. Few untagged documents will be completely accessible, but similarly few untagged documents will be completely inaccessible. I've seen few cases where an untagged PDF is less accessible to screen reader than a plain text alternative that people often request and usually the PDF offers more access features for screen reader users.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick

Senior Product Manager, Accessibility

Adobe Systems

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