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Re: Research proposal: Accessibility support for PDF, Flash, etc.

for

From: Mark Magennis
Date: Feb 24, 2010 5:00AM

Moore,Michael (DARS) wrote:

> We have been successfully building and deploying PDF forms using
> Adobe Designer since 2005. (JAWS 5/6 era). Our testing indicates
> that they are supported when properly developed even in older
> technologies.

The statement I made about PDF forms not being fully supported was
based on anecdotal evidence and reports of others (e.g. Roger Hudson www.dingoaccess.com/accessibility/accessibility-supported/)
. These suggest that there are problems with PDF forms. However, your
experiences and those of others I have heard of suggest otherwise. So
there may be problems under certain circumstances that don't arise
under others. Hence why I would like to undertake a large scale
systematic investigation.

> In my opinion these digital divide issues should remain separate
> from accessibility issues.

Practically speaking, if you're a local council with a duty and
mandate to serve all of your public, the digital divide issues are
very relevant! In our experience, the people we work with, whether
public or private sector, are more interested in real world
accessibility which encompasses the digital divide and other issues
than they are in theoretical accessibility.

> However if you wish to consider digital divide issues along with the
> accessibility issues then research into the effectiveness of open
> source solutions like NVDA, Orca and Ubuntu may be worthwhile.

Agree very much with this.
Cheers,
Mark

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