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Re: PDF will be legally accessible with the new 508

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From: Hull, Larry G. (GSFC-750.0)[GODDARD SPACE FLIGHT CENTER]
Date: Mar 24, 2010 1:03PM

I checked this PDF creation tool out. The company now has three products. See http://www.jawspdf.com/gdoc.html.

gDoc Creator(tm): The simplest solution to create PDF or XPS documents. Convert from Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PostScript, PDF and XPS.

gDoc(tm) Fusion: The easiest way to quickly create, join, and edit PDF, XPS and Word documents for sharing, printing or collaboration.

gDoc PDF Server(tm): The simple and cost-saving way to automate and manage PDF conversion across your company

I found no current references to Section 508. A 2007 white paper on the site had one passing reference.

I did not see a reply to someone's request for a reference to show where PDF will be (required to be?) legally accessible with the new 508. Can someone point me to it?

Regards,

Larry

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Karlen Communications
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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