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Re: creation of Accessible PDF documents

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Sep 22, 2011 8:24AM

Deborah,
There is nothing prohibiting any tool from either creating the PDF correctly in the first place or implementing a feature to address such a limitation. Students at universities often get significant discounts on software such as Adobe Acrobat, so if it is the best tool for the job then why not use it?

I'd be perfectly happy if the sentence read "we want to do the entire process with open source software if possible." But it didn't say that, it said that the desire was to not use commercial software, _especially_ Acrobat, singling out a specific tool, which is different than stating a broad intent to keep PDF production free.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

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http://twitter.com/awkawk
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of <EMAIL REMOVED>
Sent: Thursday, September 22, 2011 10:21 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] creation of Accessible PDF documents

Andrew wrote:

> Why "especially not Adobe Acrobat"? Trying to add extra challenges to
> the task by not allowing the most capable general-purpose tool for
> working with PDF documents? :)

Well, for one thing, it's not free. It seems counterproductive to the movement of having everything online be accessible if we reserve creating accessible documents to that group of people who can afford commercial software.

-Deborah