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Re: Are PDF forms accessible on Mac?

for

From: John E Brandt
Date: Apr 17, 2012 8:57AM

As others have stated in this thread, this is an Adobe issue not an Apple
issue. There are many programs/applications for the Mac OS that existed
before VoiceOver (VO) was developed. In an effort to be
backwards-compatible, these applications still work with the latest versions
of the OS but not necessarily with all of the OS features such as VO. The
application developer is often faced with the cost of re-building the
application from scratch to accommodate the new OS features. For whatever
reason, Adobe has not done this.

Microsoft has also been slow to update their applications for the Mac. They
moved halfway with MS Office for Mac 2011 by making the application itself
compatible with VO (The 2003 version of MS Office for Mac is not able to use
any of VO). But ironically, you cannot read the content (the actual)
document in the application with VO.

I just tested several PDFs with Preview on the Mac with VO and Adobe Acrobat
Reader for Mac OSX using the Read Out Loud feature in Acrobat Reader to see
what it would do; basically, the same results with all documents.

~j

John E. Brandt
www.jebswebs.com
<EMAIL REMOVED>
207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Paul J. Adam
Sent: Monday, April 16, 2012 4:33 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Are PDF forms accessible on Mac?

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

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