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Re: Australian Government guidance on PDF Accessibility

for

From: Birkir Rúnar Gunnarsson
Date: Jan 5, 2011 5:06PM

Kerry

I certainly do not mean to belittle the problems we face, or say that
alternative format should never be an option.
I mostly wanted to emphasize that the way of thinking, in my mind,
should be more towards "what do we need to solve this problem" rather
than "this does not work".
The downside to Word documents is that Word is unwieldy in many ways,
not free, and things such as page numbers, do not match up with the
original document, unless a lot of work is provided.
It is also both a read and write document format, which nicessitates
more complex navigation options (jumping between headers in a Word
document is not as straight forward as a single key push, even
requires a settings change in Jaws, I think).
It also open the possibility for document alterations.

What I am driving at is that I see the potential for .pdf files to be
the most accessible file format availble to blind users, if tagged
correctly (and that is a big if) and with some software improvements
The reader is free, you can jump between headings and pages, they are
anounced very nicely (in NVDA, Jaws and Hal, though only v12 of Hal,
not older versions, Hal prior to v12 does not recognize links, headers
or lists in a pdf document, and does not handle pdf forms).

I am worried that a report, if perceived to negatively, will
discourage the improvement efforts necessary to address the underlying
issues.
It won't happen overnight either, and we need information now, not in
2 years, but we need to balance these things, and I would not want the
potential that pdf has for accessibility to fall by the wayside.
I realize this is a complex process and there are no easy answers, I
just wanted to bring this point of view out better, since, as a blind
user, I am excited about the potential of the format, despite having
to email pdf creation people myself half the time to tell them to make
improvements, and try OCR scanning on quite a lot of them as well.
Thanks
-Birkir


On 1/5/11, Webb, KerryA < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Birkir wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> More logical - no argument there. But not more achievable (in the short
> term).
>
> In our jurisdiction, users typically create PDFs from Word documents by
> hitting a button. Why? Because they
> (a) don't have the proper training, and
> (b) don't have the proper software.
>
> We'll do our best to remedy both of these, but it will take time. In the
> meantime, publishing a Word or RTF equivalent beside the poorly-tagged PDF
> will (we hope) help a little.
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I'd argue that it would usually take "more work and resources" to fix the
> PDF accessibility problem than to publish an equivalent document - poor
> though it might be.
>
> One thing I'd like to know more about is the extent that older AT software
> can or can't handle properly-tagged PDF.
>
> I do appreciate the effort that Duff and his colleagues have taken to
> address the issues raised in the report.
>
> Kerry
>
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