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Are PDF forms accessible on Mac?

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From: Paul J. Adam
Date: Apr 16, 2012 2:32PM

I'm wondering if anyone on this list has any experience with or knows if PDF forms on the Mac are accessible? Can they be filled out by someone who is blind using VoiceOver? Do accessible, electronically fillable forms work in the Preview App? I tried testing some with Preview that I thought would be accessible and they did not work at all.

I installed Adobe Reader for OS X and it would not read any information in the PDF at all. Using Adobe Reader, VoceOver will not read anything in a PDF, form or not, outside of the close, minimize, zoom button, and the title.

Preview will read PDF files using VoiceOver but will not read fillable forms when tabbing through the fields like a windows screen reader such as NVDA would.

From some quick testing I'm assuming that PDF files are not accessible to VoiceOver users with Adobe Reader. Preview is the best app to read PDF files but does not work with fillable forms.

This is one of the major reasons I advocate using only HTML forms and docs over PDF or Office formats.

Hopefully someone can prove me wrong here?

Thanks!



Paul J. Adam
Accessibility Evangelist
Deque Systems
<EMAIL REMOVED>
www.PaulJAdam.com
@pauljadam on Twitter