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Re: PDF on websites + PDF is *not* accessible

for

From: Duff Johnson
Date: Jul 10, 2013 6:37PM

> For users who depend on Speech recognition, this is an area where the speech recognition tools _could_ support interaction with Adobe Reader to red PDF documents in a more robust way, but haven't. Some speech recognition tool makers don't regard their tool as an accessibility tool but merely an efficiency tool, so they haven't bothered to utilize the accessibility API information that Reader provides for all assistive technologies, not just for screen readers or screen magnifiers. As a result, these tools do provide access to PDF documents but not with the full efficiency that is possible to help the end users.
>
> I totally agree that speech recognition gets inadequate focus - if you have suggestions about how we can help promote improvements I'm happy to work toward greater access.

I agree in general, but would emphasize a slightly different point.

a) To get your favorite software developer (of any type of AT, or other software they don't think of as AT) on-board with desirable levels of performance with PDF files, tell them you "want software that understands PDF/UA."

It's a very simple message and it tells them exactly how to start down the road, from a technical standpoint.

b) While accessibility requirements may often be expressed in screen-reader terms that's not because other UIs are being ignored per se. It is also true (and not a coincidence) that the features driving high-quality interactions using screen-readers is *also* the same feature-set (tags) that can be leveraged to help many different types of users (some of them not "disabled" at all) to to get around documents, tables, lists, links, etc, or get a good experience on mobile devices, or work with search engines, etc.

Here's the question:

If your software supports tagged PDF and (ideally) PDF/UA, it stands a very good chance indeed of delivering an excellent experience on a well-tagged PDF.

If your software doesn't support tagged PDF the chances aren't good at all, irrespective of the PDF.

Duff.