WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: usage of abbreviation tag

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Sep 18, 2013 2:49AM

Hi Jukka,

let me make clear that I believe that you and I agree at least 99.9% - this exchange of emails is just to go through some interesting exercises…!

Am 18 Sep 2013 um 10:20 schrieb Jukka K. Korpela < <EMAIL REMOVED> >:

> So there is a challenge: how to present things so that they are
> accessible to all

When working on PDF/UA (the ISO standard for accessible PDF documents, ISO 14289-1:2012, where UA stands for 'universal accessibility') we had a discussion in the PDF/UA working grouping in ISO TC 171 (ISO stands for International Organisation for Standardisation - see www.iso.org for more info - and TC is a shorthand for Technical Committee), how far we should go in requiring certain accessibility aspects. We essentially arrived at the conclusion that it is not the task of a technical standard like PDF/UA, or actually most of WCAG, to fix just about anything.

If a PDF document consists of difficult to understand garbage, it is not he task of PDF/UA to require that the garbage is "un-garbaged", and that it is made easy to understand, but only, to make this garbage as accessible to people with disabilities, as it is to people without disabilities. So it is important to require that reading order is defined, that for non-text content text equivalents are provided etc. But there is no requirement that states "Garbage quality documents must be rewritten such that they become quality content that is easy to understand.".

Now, there might be situations, where such garbage documents or garbage content are unacceptable - like important websites from government agencies (and ideally also any website that is essential to daily life) - but it would be impossible (and even not completely desirable) to enforce that people stop producing garbage quality content. It would make a lot of sense though, that - as much as possible - any content (garbage quality or not) is provided in a fashion that it can be accessed similarly well by people with and without disabilities.

Olaf

PS: I intentionally did not make it clear above that PDF in this email does not stand for Parkinson Disease Foundation, but rather for Portable Document Format, an electronic document format invented by Adobe Systems and first published in 1993, and meanwhile, in 2008, ratified as an international standard by ISO (ISO 32000).