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Re: PowerPoint accessibility-alt question

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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Apr 24, 2014 4:42PM

John,

> I will not defend Apple on this one, but the issue regarding the
> inaccessibility of PDF in the Mac OS is with Adobe.

Let’s be clear.

The issue of Adobe’s support for Tagged PDF on the Mac is Adobe’s problem.

The issue of Apple’s support for Tagged PDF is Apple’s problem.

PDF is just PDF. There’s nothing Adobe-specific about accessible PDF.

> 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.

That’s fair - but most Mac users use Preview to read PDF files.

The other way to look at it is this:

Apple - the richest software company on the planet - is unwilling (so far) to make Preview, their PDF viewer, work with accessible PDF.

I contrasted Apple and NVDA in this regard in a blog-post earlier this year:

http://duff-johnson.com/2013/03/01/inaccessible-by-choice-pdf-on-macos/

> 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.

This is 100% Apple’s choice - it has nothing to do with Adobe. No-one forced Apple to support PDF in Preview!

> 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.

It does. OpenOffice will create a tagged PDF on the Mac. I just checked / confirmed.

Thank you for the reminder / correction.

Duff.