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Re: Australian Government guidance on PDF Accessibility

for

From: Duff Johnson
Date: Jan 5, 2011 4:12PM

Birkir,

I think you've put it much better than I, and far more concisely!

Duff.

On Jan 5, 2011, at 1:07 PM, Birkir Rúnar Gunnarsson wrote:

> 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
>>
>>