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Re: tagging PDF's

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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Mar 22, 2012 12:27PM

On Mar 22, 2012, at 1:03 PM, Bevi Chagnon wrote:

> 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.

I appreciate this point entirely, and thank you for raising it as I should have done.

My comments were intended to bewail the prevailing situation, not to recommend against using Reflow per se. Indeed, my company makes software that "harmonizes" tags and content-order; we do this because it's a requested feature, no matter my big-picture gripes. So what if I know that they don't know what they're missing? They want it, I get that.

The reason I rant on this point as I do is simply that this precise issue is the foundation of the AT community's entirely justified frustration with PDF. Perpetuating software that causes people to expend effort on documents to make them work with a particular piece of software - as opposed to work in general - bothers me.

In other words - by all means, make your PDFs "work" with Reflow - but be sure they're properly tagged FIRST. Indeed, the tag-order is the "order" that the content should follow, if you want Reflow to be successful.

> 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.

I don't dispute that it's useful to some and that the price is right. It could do vastly more if it was implemented correctly - that's my only point.

> 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.

Yes, if you know what you're doing in InDesign, a highly accessible PDF is easy to produce. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for the vast majority of PDFs that are created using other means.

> < 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.

Yes. I'm simply pointing out that the Reflow experience - were it based on tags - would be profoundly better than what they have today.

> < 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.

I appreciate the clarification.

Best regards,

Duff Johnson

President, NetCentric US (Creators of CommonLook)
Office: +1 617 401 8140
Mobile: +1 617 283 4226
<EMAIL REMOVED>
www.commonlook.com