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Re: PDF on websites

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Jun 25, 2013 8:33AM

I agree with most of what you say here David, but I can't help but chime in. When you say "even accessible PDFs can create usability challenges on web sites" some people may incorrectly interpret that as suggesting that the converse is true, that "accessible HTML files do not create usability challenges on web sites". This is of course not what you meant (I hope) as any document or file type can create usability challenges.

For some types of content, offering a PDF version may address some usability challenges that are found in an HTML version even. I've lost my place in a very long HTML document and found it frustrating that they only way to return to a specific location is to re-navigate through the document to that point. With a PDF document this is much easier.

In short, I don't think that a policy like "convert all of your PDFs to HTML" is always the best approach.

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

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