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Re: Wait, wait...who has to abide by Sec. 508?

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From: Karlen Communications
Date: Apr 19, 2019 4:46PM

I hate to bring up the dreaded "R"" word (redaction) but are the ISO committees working with AT developers to ensure that when PDF - 2 and PDF/UA - 2 are adopted as part of legislation, that those of us who use adaptive technology can benefit from the plethora of attributes, metadata and so forth?

It is difficult to support and advocate for something when the "standards" say "you have access to this" and the reality is that we don't.

In terms of redactions, we need to know how much has been redacted...visually you can tell if it is a word or two, part of a line, a line, part of a paragraph, paragraphs, pages...in order to understand what we are reading, we need to know exactly what is available visually so that we don't start troubleshooting our technology, thinking it is skipping over things.

Are the PDF/PDF/UA committees working with the government and legal community to support tagged PDF with redactions? To help them understand the security and the need?

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of <EMAIL REMOVED>
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2019 3:48 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Wait, wait...who has to abide by Sec. 508?

Just because it's common practice doesn't give the legal community a valid excuse for doing it. It'll probably take a high-profile lawsuit to get the legal community to make their documents accessible.

And with his particular report, DOJ's Mueller Report, it's a public-facing document created by a federal agency so it's covered by Sec. 508. They are not above the law.

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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Duff Johnson
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2019 2:34 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Wait, wait...who has to abide by Sec. 508?

> I've heard it's a common practice in litigation as well to delivery OCR'd documents without tags to make it more difficult for the other side to search digital information during discovery. So -- seems like a tactic to make it more difficult to find and analyze the data. I could also imagine that there might be some misunderstandings about redaction and PDF tags that could trigger concerns by those releasing redacted content.

That's all true; it's a (lamentably) common practice in litigation.

However in this case it's clearly DoJ's job to know about those matters… and to know that there's no problem or concern with redacting tagged PDF. Redacted is redacted.

Sadly, we've yet to see developers supporting the new features in PDF 2.0 that explicitly enable accessible redaction… but if people do as the DoJ did - trash their PDFs by rendering them as images - then tags are kind of irrelevant.

Duff.