WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: clarification please -> PDF/UA

for

From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Feb 26, 2015 5:44AM

Ø PDF/UA for sure is a higher standard than anything one could derive from WCAG when thinking about how to make PDFs accessible.



Unfortunately I have to disagree with part of that comment. I think PDF/UA is great but it is not a replacement to WCAG and I will be commenting on that to the US Access Board.



For example, take color and contrast. I have included a snippet below from Matterhorn that talks about PDF/UA 7.1.



04-001 Information is conveyed by contrast, color, format or layout, or some combination thereof but the content is not tagged to reflect all meaning conveyed by the use of contrast, color, format or layout, or some combination thereof.



Nothing in the above requires that alternatives to color be visible to people who are colorblind - only that alternatives be available in the tags structure.



Nothing in the above requires that sufficient contrast be used in the document content - only that contrast isn't used to convey meaning.



There are also similar notes about use of sound:

All information conveyed with sound should also be available without sound.



In my opinion the above should needs to be a must.



Also you'll find nothing mentioned about the PDF containing closed captions or audio description when multimedia is present.



So, while PDF/UA is important it only gets you part of the way to WCAG conformance. - you still need WCAG.



On a related note, I have used the axesPDF QuickFix program and I've found it to be very helpful in fixing documents that had corrupted tag structures. So, for anyone who has tagged a 100 page PDF only to find that the tag structure is corrupt and suddenly you can't tag content properly this tool can be invaluable. While there may be other products that do this some tool manufacturers won't sell to others they see as competition so it's great to have several choices like QuickFix on the market.



Jonathan





--

Jonathan Avila

Chief Accessibility Officer

SSB BART Group

<EMAIL REMOVED>



703-637-8957 (o)

Follow us: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn | Blog | Newsletter