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Re: PDF will be legally accessible with the new 508

for

From: Hoffman, Allen
Date: Mar 23, 2010 1:30PM

Can someone point to the part of the refresh of the Section 508
standards that would say "PDF is accessible"?

In my view, content in PDF format can be accessible if authored
correctly.


-----Original Message-----
From: Karlen Communications [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Monday, March 22, 2010 6:53 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PDF will be legally accessible with the new 508

Ironically there is a company called JAWS that has had PDF creation
software
for years.
http://www.jawspdf.com/

They didn't used to be interested in accessibility but I haven't checked
them out recently.

I don't see anything about accessibility on their site.

I found them by accident in the early days of a GUI Internet when
looking
for screen reader information. :-)

Cheers, Karen


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Christophe
Strobbe
Sent: March-22-10 6:31 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PDF will be legally accessible with the new 508


At 05:37 20/03/2010, John Foliot wrote:
>(...)
>We know that there are legacy PDF's out there that will not be
accessible,
>and likely a few still being created today that are not as rich as
>Acrobat/Live Design could produce. We can only blame that on history
and
>poor training though, right? Is this a problem with "PDF" or of poor
>authoring practice and the early history of PDF? (...)

There is still a lot of work to be done to improve authoring
practices. I am involved in several projects funded by the European
Commission that had to rework deliverables because the PDF files were
not accessible or not tagged. I had to teach people how to use
Heading styles in MS Word and how to generate tagged PDF from
OpenOffice.org - even more than a year after the start of these
projects. These projects, as all the work I do, focus on
accessibility for people with disabilities. There is a cruel irony in
this.

Lesson learnt: provide tutorials about accessibile authoring
practices at the start of such projects.


>Interesting note about cheap alternatives that generate pseudo-PDFs
that
>lack access features. Are you aware of any examples that I could see?
It
>would be interesting to see what if anything they do produce - perhaps
we
>should go after those software companies instead - I wonder aloud if
ISO
>could modify the once proprietary but now open PDF standard to place a
>stronger insistence on accessibility to be called "PDF" (worth asking,
>no?). If bad software tools (versus a file format) is the culprit, we
>should point that out with proof, and attack the real problem. Most
large
>organizations that I know of, the majority will not buy faulty tools if
>they can avoid it, so the market place can be our friend if we are
smart
>about it.

John, are you looking for overviews like the following?
* JISC TechDIS: "Coparison of Free PDF Software" (no date)
<http://www.techdis.ac.uk/index.php?p=3_20_2_2>;
* "Accessibility testing 14 PDF creation tools" (12 September 2009):

<http://www.pws-ltd.com/sections/articles/2009/pdf_conversion_tools.html
>.


Best regards,

Christophe Strobbe



--
Christophe Strobbe
K.U.Leuven - Dept. of Electrical Engineering - SCD
Research Group on Document Architectures
Kasteelpark Arenberg 10 bus 2442
B-3001 Leuven-Heverlee
BELGIUM
tel: +32 16 32 85 51
http://www.docarch.be/
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