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Accessible HTML Document Viewer

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From: Christopher Phillips
Date: Nov 15, 2017 1:26PM

Hello everyone,
There are a number of services available that convert documents to HTML to display in the browser. There are a number of services out there, examples include:

1. Box View https://developer.box.com/page/box-view
2. PDF.js https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/
3. Viewer.js http://viewerjs.org/
4. ARender http://arender.fr/
5. NYTimes Document Viewer https://github.com/documentcloud/document-viewer

I haven't done a comprehensive audit of all the tools I've come across, but all of them I have looked at so far provide a text layer of the document text that strips out all of the structure and semantic information, even when it exists in the source document.

These type of document viewers are fairly common on in learning management systems, news sites or anywhere else that shows original content. I keep thinking there must be a solution that does a better job at extracting and presenting the information in an accessible way, but haven't found it yet. Is anyone aware of an accessible HTML document viewer?

--
Christopher Phillips
Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Coordinator
Center for Innovative Design and Instruction
Utah State University
http://accessibility.usu.edu/
435-797-5535