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Re: Tagging issues with Acrobat Pro DC

for

From: chagnon
Date: Apr 11, 2019 11:23AM

Duff wrote: "Tagged PDF has been around for almost 20 years… what is the excuse for implementations that ignore them? Why is such software tolerated?"

Not defending the A T software and hardware manufacturers, but we really didn't give them a workable, defined specification about how to do this until PDF/UA-1 was released in 2012, 7 years ago. And up until 2008, PDF was a proprietary file format owned and controlled by Adobe so it was difficult for any 3rd party software or technology to process it, let alone A T.

Many of today's assistive technologies have roots going back before there was even a tag tree in PDF, so they bear the cost of substantially overhauling their technologies to work with today's standards. Do they have a large enough market (and with it, the profit margins) to finance the R & D for an extensive overhaul?

Are their customers asking for this? Are they willing to pay for the new technology, ditching their old versions? Many people have limited discretionary income, so if a braille embosser from 2005 is still working for them, they might not feel the need to replace it.

Finally, how well did we, the accessibility community and organizations, reach out and support the manufacturers in making these changes?

Personally, I'm not going to be so cavalier in trouncing any of the stakeholders. We all live in glass houses, after all <grin>.

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