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Re: Are PDF portfolios accessible to screen readers?

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Jul 1, 2010 9:00AM

There is a preference, as Karen mentions, in the Acrobat and Reader preferences (accessibility category, under "other accessibility options"). The option is labeled "Always show portfolios in platform control".

One of the items we discussed at CSUN is work to make portfolios accessible without this fallback preference being required, so we plan to have a much easier approach in a future release.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://twitter.com/awkawk
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Karlen Communications
Sent: Thursday, July 01, 2010 6:52 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Are PDF portfolios accessible to screen readers?

Not at this time. Portfolios are displayed in a Flash application that is
not accessible.

There is a setting in the user preferences under Accessibility I think to
not use Portfolio to display content but I find that Acrobat 9/not sure
about Reader 9 doesn't always respect this. Sometimes if something has been
saved as a Portfolio and you do have the option not to view things in
Portfolio checked you will get a sort of hybrid where the content is
displayed using Acrobat/Reader but the Find tool results in an inaccessible
Flash based list of found items.

Adobe does know about this and is working on it.

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Iza Bartosiewicz
Sent: July-01-10 2:31 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Are PDF portfolios accessible to screen readers?

Hi everyone,

Can anyone enlighten me regarding the accessibility of PDF portfolios?
Assuming that the portfolio includes properly tagged PDF documents, is it
possible for people using screen readers (or keyboard only) to navigate to
and open the individual documents?


I've just been given a portfolio file to test and I couldn't access the
individual documents using keyboard alone. This may be because the portfolio
I got was poorly put together, but the fact that Read Out Loud options were
greyed-out, and the accessibility check wasn't available may mean that the
problem lies with the portfolio format, not just that single example.

Info about PDF portfolios:
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/Acrobat/9.0/Standard/WS0FAA9C25-EBE6-4492-9504-7
565D0097800.html

Thanks

Iza