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Re: How is PDF accessibility evaluated?

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From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Feb 6, 2015 5:58PM

Susan wrote: "So I shouldn't be using the WCAG guidelines (and I thought the W3 was a standards board) at all?"

WAI is the standards board for accessibility, under the larger W3C organization.
WCAG are the guidelines developed by the WAI.

It's not that you shouldn't be using the WCAG guidelines for PDFs, it's more that they were written specifically for website/HTML information and many of guidelines don't fit well with PDFs . Remember, when they were initially developed around 2000 (if I recall the dates correctly), they addressed only website information. Office documents and PDFs weren't then -- and still aren't today -- specifically addressed.

Four terms to understand in this discussion:
-- Guidelines, as in "WCAG" means a broad overview of what's trying to be achieved. Sometimes those guidelines apply, sometimes they don't, depending upon the material, file format, content, usage, etc. Quoting from the WCAG website, "The 12 guidelines provide the basic goals that authors should work toward in order to make content more accessible to users with different disabilities. The guidelines are not testable, but provide the framework and overall objectives to help authors understand the success criteria and better implement the techniques." Note the phrase, guidelines are not testable.
-- A standard is a hard and fixed requirement. It's measureable and the content either passes or fails. (Or wins a court case or not, or the owner is fined or not, etc.)
-- A success criteria or checkpoint is a way to test whether a guideline has been met.
-- And a technique is a suggestion as to how the guidelines/standards/success criteria can be met by those who create the content.

So yes, you should still refer to WCAG, but in regards to PDFs, WAI has only given us suggestions and methods, not standards or even guidelines. It's one person's way of doing things (or maybe it was put together by a small group). There are many other "techniques" you could use to achieve the same results.

On the other hand, the PDF UA is an ISO standard; ISO = the International Standards Organization. These are defined standards and thus give us something to assess PDFs, haul people's butts into court, etc. But the PDF US standards have to become more widely accepted and formally adopted by governments and other institutions before they can be applied, and I believe that's what Duff and his crew are working on. Well, I hope they are.

In reviewing WCAG itself, more than half of the guidelines don't apply at all to PDFs for one reason or another, but mostly because we just can do some of those tasks in PDFs. Or in Word documents, for that matter.

One more quirk in all this:
-- W3C sets the standards for HTML, so they can write any standards and guidelines they want to cover websites.
-- But Acrobat PDF is controlled by Adobe, MS Word et al by Microsoft.
So an outsider like the W3C can't tell these 2 corporations what to do with their software and proprietary formats. It's a detente situation: all the players have to come to mutual agreement on these things. Luckily, both Adobe and Microsoft have been fairly decent on this, not perfect, but better than most software companies. Ask anyone how accessible Oracle's software is!

--Bevi Chagnon