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Re: A better PDF editor for accessibility?

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Jun 11, 2013 5:26PM

Olaf wrote: "accessible PDF so far has not been a success story."
Jonathan replied: "Isn¹t it premature to make this statement? Isn¹t it less
than a year old?"

What's less than a year old?
Acrobat itself and the PDF standard were created in the late 1980s and
released to the public in 1993, 20 years ago.
Accessibility tools first appeared in Acrobat 6 (pdf spec 1.5) in 2003, 10
years ago, although they were marginal.
Significant accessibility tools appeared in Acrobat 8 (pdf spec 1.7) in
2006, and more tools/features have been added to every version since.

I think Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and all the other big industry players
should have done a better job by now of providing a coordinated set of tools
and standards for accessibility.

Going back to Olaf's comment, "accessible PDF so far has not been a success
story."

It depends, Olaf, on how the original source document was created. When we
create a well-built and structured Word, PowerPoint, or InDesign source
file, the resulting PDF has few flaws that need fixing in Acrobat Pro. None
of my testers complain about those PDFs.

So the argument goes back to: how do we get users to create good,
well-structured, correctly tagged/styled source documents which then create
good, well-structured, correctly tagged PDFs?

Better tools in the source programs is critical, but the biggest hurdle is
teaching the ordinary, everyday Word user how to use MS Word correctly! Very
few know how to use paragraph styles, and styles are the central part of a
tagged, accessible PDF...or EPUB, or XML file, or HTML file, or whatever
digital media file will be the final presentation to the end-user.

So, educating users in the basics of accessibility and MS Word is step #1.
And some of us on this list are doing that training, but with a lingering
world-wide recession and economic failure, budgets for training are
virtually nil at all government agencies, their contractors and suppliers,
and educational institutions. Everyone's expected to know MS Word, but in
reality they don't.

—Bevi Chagnon
—
www.PubCom.com — Trainers, Consultants, Designers, Developers.
Print, Web, Acrobat, XML, eBooks, and U.S. Federal Section 508
Accessibility.
New schedule for classes and workshops coming in 2013.