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Re: Do fonts have to be embedded in a WCAG 2.0 conformingPDFdocument?

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Apr 15, 2015 1:06PM

Catching up on this thread...

Can you have a WCAG 2.0-conforming PDF document without embedded fonts? Yes.

Will all users be able to read the text in that document? No, not always.

When you don't embed a font in a PDF document the textual information still exists within the document and is used to populate the accessibility structure for the document. If you don't embed the font then Adobe Acrobat Reader (and earlier versions of Reader) will map the text information to a Latin-1 font. If you are starting with a font that uses the same characters as a Latin-1 font then Reader will do its best to match the font by name or by appearance with a font that the user has available on their system.

The situation is very much like in HTML when an author references a font that they have on their system but that other end-users may not. Browsers can make their best guess, and that may work out in many cases but not all.

Is having a font that is different from the author's original intent an accessibility issue? I don't think so.

> - Some users may depend on characteristics such as word-spacing, line-spacing, text alignment, etc to understand the document. As one example, imagine a screen magnifier user dealing with text in which the breaks between words aren't clear, or where characters overlap. A conventional user might have the problem to a limited extent, but the user running the magnifier is much more likely to be very seriously affected.

But this is no different an issue than if an author chose one of the fonts that the PDF reader used as the replacement when creating the document to begin with, so I disagree that this is an accessibility issue.

> - AT software that replaces or manipulates fonts (for example to accommodate those with dyslexia) will not be able to function predictably (if at all).

I don't understand why this would be a problem. If the AT discards the font that is referenced and replaces it with a different font that is available, how does a negative result present?

>> It seems that this is an overall usability issue for all people

> It is certainly that, but it also disproportionally affects users with disabilities.

I'm not sure how that is an accurate statement yet. As far as I can tell it isn't having a disproportionate effect.

> …but which SC?

Barring additional new information I'd say "none".

AWK