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Re: Link labels and APA citations

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Oct 20, 2014 11:49AM

On 20 Oct 2014, at 18:25, Jonathan Avila < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>> Those might work for websites, but to the best of my knowledge, we can't do Aria in PDFs, PowerPoints, and Word documents. And controlling link appearance in PDFs is a time consuming nightmare.
>
> You can use the "ActualText" property in PDF to specify a programmatic replacement to the text that is displayed. This would akin to aria-label.


Please not, Never. Never ever. ActualText in pDF is to be used to indicate what text is displayed, even if such text is not encoded as text (e.g. an image or vector art) or not as that text (e.g. a text object whose encoding doesn't lend itself to derive the actual text as perceived by a sighted user looking at the rendered page). It is not (!) akin to anything known in the HTML world (but it would be a nice addition to the HTML world…).

If accessibility is ever to become a success, we all must stay away from highjacking mechanisms for something they weren't designed or defined for.

This whole line of reasoning shining up in this thread leads to more problems than it solves… I can accept a hack in an emergency situation but I can't accept a hack as a part of official methodology.


For some background:

excerpt from Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) 1.0 - see http://www.w3.org/TR/wai-aria/states_and_properties#aria-label
> aria-label (property)
>
> Defines a string value that labels the current element.

excerpt from ISO 32000-1 (PDF 1.7), 14.9.4 Replacement Text (download free of charge version of the ISO standard from http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html ):

> • The ActualText value shall be used as a replacement, not a description, for the content, providing text that is equivalent to what a person would see when viewing the content.



Olaf