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Re: pdf remedeation service

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From: Jon Metz
Date: Apr 20, 2016 9:01PM

Hi Lucy,
I seem to remember a booth for them at a (reasonably) recent Fed A11y thing at the Department of Transportation building here in DC (should that jog anyone's memory), but I have not tried their service before.

I downloaded some of their PDF white papers and none of them were PDFUA. For me, the lack of PDFUA is a bit of a red flag since it's selling that as a service, but they are tagged better than most companies that sell services for this stuff, and WAY better than PDFs from other industries I've come across. There are a few errors, but nothing to really shake a stick at. They clearly know what to do to make a well crafted tagged PDF, so I would venture to guess they could be capable at what it is their offering.

I mention this because I advise anyone looking at PDF services like this to make sure the PDFs on the companies sites are of good quality. We seem to do the same when reviewing similar web accessibility services, but it seems to be an overlooked procedure when looking at PDF stuff.

Whoever you decide to go with, I suggest you ask them about the authoring software you use (Word, InDesign, etc.), but also how well they understand the format of PDF itself. Most of the problems you'll encounter in your PDFs will be solved by understanding the underlying syntax that makes up a PDF.

I'd also ask any company for a PDFUA document for an example, but ask them to provide a detailed explanation of why they structured the document the way they did. Not all PDFUA documents are of the same quality, I'm afraid.

A shameless plug, but you can also reach out to me privately if you want. If nothing more I can at least point you in a good direction.


Hope this helps,
Jon Metz




On 4/20/16, 2:28 PM, "WebAIM-Forum on behalf of Lucy Greco" < <EMAIL REMOVED> on behalf of <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> hello:has any one her of this product before
>http://www.crawfordtech.com/products/pdfua
>if so what can you tell me about them how does the prodoct work and can it
>reely creat accessable pdf files thanks lucy
>Lucia Greco
>Web Accessibility Evangelist
>IST - Architecture, Platforms, and Integration
>University of California, Berkeley
>(510) 289-6008 skype: lucia1-greco
>http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
>Follow me on twitter @accessaces
>>>>