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

for

From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Feb 24, 2010 7:24AM

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.

Just to clarify, I'm not reading Roger's post as saying that PDF forms are not accessibility supported, I'm reading that he encountered some issues and he wants greater clarity around what accessibility-supported means for any technology.

He in fact says "At the outset, I would like to make it clear that although this test involved PDF forms, my comments are not intended as a reflection on the general use or accessibility of PDF and could equally apply to any other web technology."

Accessibility support is a very tricky topic, and I'm glad that you are interested in getting this study going, I'm sure it will be interesting and Adobe will certainly be sharing information that will help your efforts - we have a heap of data that I'm publishing in the next week or two.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Senior Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

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