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Re: Series of PDF/UA video tutorials

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From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Mar 22, 2016 11:46AM

Hi Kelly,

> On 22.03.2016, at 18:33, Kelly Lupo < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Was there an accessibility reason to disallow transparent effects at the
> time, or was it purely technical (IE: difficulty in tagging objects
> appropriately), and advances have made this possible under PDF/A-2?

the development of PDF/A-1 happened during 2002 - 2004 (with publication in 2005). At that time, transparency effects (introduced in 2001) were still relatively new, and not all (or even the majority of) tools supported transparency well (not to mention the trend that tools and systems are only updated every 3, 4, 5 or even more years…) - thus transparency still felt a bit scary to people who have a focus on predictability / repeatability / interoperability when it comes to rendering (on screen or in the form of a printout). As a consequence it was decided to not allow transparency for the time being. Meanwhile, PDF technology has matured quite a bit across the board, and in 2011 it seemed safe to allow transparency.

The decision to disallow transparency in PDF/A-1 had nothing to do with (support for) tagging.

Olaf