WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Series of PDF/UA video tutorials

for

From: Jon Metz
Date: Mar 22, 2016 2:26PM


Olaf, Thank you so much for providing the technical background for why PDF/A was omitted.

Kelly,the primary reason why I did not go into it was because it was out of scope for the tutorials. There's a number of things I was planning on doing for the tutorial, but realized that including all the things would have made them much longer and taken an already confusing subject and made it way worse! However, I intend to cover those in the future, such as OCR, dealing with acronyms, tables, etc. Eventually I'll get to them, but for now I hope the videos provide a decent foundation for things.

However, the next video (which still remains to be cut and finished) covers how to actually test for accessibility for these PDFs. I have a feeling this is going to be ore popular than these other videos as it will answer a lot of questions for people!

Thanks so much for all the feedback. I really appreciate it. As far as using the videos, they're all in the Creative Commons with attribution, so feel free to use them as much as you want. Also, the materials I used should technically be in the public domain because of where I found them. Feel free to reach out to me with any questions/concerns/suggestions, etc.

Thanks!
Jon






On 3/22/16, 10:50 AM, "WebAIM-Forum on behalf of Kelly Lupo" < <EMAIL REMOVED> on behalf of <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>Thank you again! The more I learn, the more I realize how much I still
>need to learn. :)
>
>Kelly
>
>On Tue, Mar 22, 2016 at 1:46 PM, Olaf Drümmer < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
>wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>> >> >> >> >>
>>>>