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Re: PowerPoint accessibility-alt question

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From: John E Brandt
Date: Apr 24, 2014 4:02PM

I will not defend Apple on this one, but the issue regarding the
inaccessibility of PDF in the Mac OS is with Adobe. The Adobe Acrobat Reader
simply does not work with VoiceOver on the Mac OS. Like many legacy third
party applications for the Mac OS, including Microsoft Office for the Mac,
Adobe has not been willing to spend the money to rewrite the application to
work with VoiceOver. In fairness, it would be an expensive process,
particularly for a piece of software that is given away for free.

Currently, as others have mentioned, you can view/read PDF files using the
free Preview application built into Mac OSX. But this will only read the
text and you will lose all of the tagging including headings and layout
features.

As for making accessible PDF documents with the Mac OSX, the last time I
checked, the only way was with LibreOffice (and perhaps OpenOffice). You can
make an accessible word publisher document and save it as a PDF and it would
retain the proper tagging. Honestly, I haven't checked that for several
years, but I would assume it still works.

~j

John E. Brandt
jebswebs: accessible and universal web design,
development and consultation
<EMAIL REMOVED>
207-622-7937
Augusta, Maine, USA

@jebswebs