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Re: A better PDF editor for accessibility?

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From: Williams, William R -FS
Date: Jun 11, 2013 5:47PM

Budgets for the federal agencies are indeed 'shrinking,' but there is growing awareness among employees and contractors of the need to produce accessible Word docs ... of the need to produce accessible electronic documents.

What's missing is ownership and management accountability for this responsibility.

Bill Williams
Communications Specialist

U.S. Forest Service,
Pacific Southwest Region
1323 Club Drive
Vallejo CA 94592

http://www.fs.usda.gov/r5
707.562.9005

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Chagnon | PubCom
Sent: Tuesday, June 11, 2013 4:26 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] A better PDF editor for accessibility?

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.


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