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Re: Australian Government guidance on PDF Accessibility

for

From: Birkir Rúnar Gunnarsson
Date: Jan 5, 2011 11:09AM

One thing that PDF and Daisy have, that other formats simply do not
really, is pageination.
HTML does not, as far as I know, allow a user to go to a specific
page, if the document is alternatively produced (e.g. scanned into
Word or plain text) a lot of manual work would need to go into setting
up the pageination again.
It is important for the blind end user to be able to follow along and
not having to translate or arbitrarily look for text, in order to keep
up with sighted peers in an academic or corporate environment.
Therefore the .pdf technology actually offers features the "accessible
alternatives" do not.
I feel this is often forgotten when people discuss the accessibility
(or not) of .pdf files. And the importance of having one source file
used by all users goes beyond pageination as well. I, as a blind user,
am really sick and tired of working with a file specially made for me
with slight variations from the original, even if I understand the
current need and appreciate that I do have access.
The blind community needs to move towards using the sighted world and
away from special formats.
Therefore it seems a lot more logical to me to fix accessibility
issues with .pdf files, rather than solve the problem by producing
other formats, but that has been the standard thinking in many ways
for a long time, probably created by necessity, back when we had a lot
less flexible and adaptive technology to work with.
The option of creating content specifically for the blind also puts
more work and resources on dedicated personnel that could be used to
fixing the original accessibility problem, be it on the
server/authoring side, general education or Assistive Technology bug
fixes and improvements.


On 1/5/11, Duff Johnson < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> On Jan 5, 2011, at 10:53 AM, Langum, Michael J wrote:
>
>> I thought this was an excellent and insightful article.
>
> Thanks! Much appreciated.
>
>> In the article, you mentioned that there was no data comparing
>> the costs of remediation (e.g. adding tags, and applying structural
>> tags), to reformatting (e.g. into HTML).
>
> Well... there's no study on the subject that I'm aware of. Which is a great
> shame, because there are lots of strong opinions on this - all of which
> would greatly benefit from a cold shower of fact.
>
>> You also questioned the cost of providing accessibility before
>> and after training authors on the need and methods for adding
>> structure and other elements to documents would also be very valuable.
>
> This is one of the things usually neglected when comparing HTML to PDF in
> accessibility terms. The stumbling point, I think, is that web-content
> managers are a (relatively) tiny group of technically-minded people. Finding
> and training HTML authors on accessibility techniques is (relatively)
> easy... compared to PDF.
>
> In the world of PDF, everyone's an author, regardless of training, software
> quality, etc.
>
> My point in the article is simply that rather than wishing the "hard case"
> of PDF away by pretending that PDF can be readily replaced or augmented with
> HTML, the correct policy simply demands the same accessibility from PDF as
> is demanded from any other format... and recognizes that broad-based
> training, education and resources will be necessary to get there.
>
> The alternative is that web-content managers become the choke-point through
> which all the world's content has to fit before it's accessible, and that's
> absurd.
>
>> Are you aware of any good studies that make such comparisons.
>
> I wish I was aware of such, but I am not.
>
>> It seems like that would be a good topic for some doctoral student, or
>> Adobe (since they own both Acrobat and Dreamweaver).
>
> Agreed.
>
> Given that this question has distinct budgetary overtones and consequences,
> and given the existing mandates... it's also an appropriate sort of thing
> for government agencies to study (or fund the study thereof).
>
> Hint Hint! :-)
>
> Duff Johnson
> Appligent Document Solutions
> http://www.appligent.com
> Blog: http://www.appligent.com/talkingpdf
> Tweets: http://www.twitter.com/duffjohnson
>
>