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Re: tagging PDF's

for

From: Bevi Chagnon
Date: Mar 22, 2012 11:51AM

Duff, your points are noted.

I'm not going to defend Reflow and other technologies that use the reading
order.

But I don't believe we have the luxury to ignore Reading Order, or tell
users that they shouldn't use the free Reflow utility in Acrobat and instead
should purchase and use another tool. Or tell users with older AT they must
upgrade, even when they can't afford the cost.

Sure, Reflow isn't a great tool for accessibility but it's free, it's easy
to learn, it satisfies the need for a certain portion of the population, and
senior and disability centers show their clients how to use it. As a
teacher, I've worked with many disabled users on a fixed income with little
money to spare. They have few alternatives so they'll do what most people do
-- use what's already there. Not a perfect solution, but it "suffices" for
them.

A better strategy is to acknowledge that the tool exists and people use it,
and therefore we should work with it as much as it is feasible to do so.
Since it takes just a few mouse clicks in the source document to clean up
most, if not all, of the reading order, I think it's worth the time to do
so. This is not hard to do in most InDesign layouts.


< Further, so-called AT depending on "reading order" is incapable (in
principle, not just in practice) of representing semantic structures such as
lists and tables. >

Semantic structure isn't as critical for those AT users who are fully
sighted. Helpful at times, but not as critical as for blind and low-vision
users.


< How fantastically embarrassing that InDesign is still so poor at PDF
production! How many years has it been since tagged PDF was released? >

Actually, InDesign isn't "so poor at PDF production." About 90% of the
problems I see are user errors (often untrained users who don't even use
paragraph styles to trigger semantic tags, let alone other layout
techniques). The other 10%, sure Adobe needs to work on those issues and
from what I understand, they're aware of at least the most important ones.

But I'm not here to defend Adobe, either. Just trying to clarify the
discussion.

--Bevi
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Bevi Chagnon | <EMAIL REMOVED>
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