Non-Adobe developer forums:
Well, WebAIM isn't an Adobe-controlled forum so this would be my best
recommendation to you. There are people from the ISO PDF and PDF/UA
committees who are on this list and chime in when needed, as well as folks
who are members of the PDF Association.
The "'Tagged PDF Best Practice Guide" is, sadly, incomplete. Forthcoming
revised versions for PDF/UA-1 and PDF/UA-2 will be available in the future.
What to do at this time:
My firm's analysis and reasoning is this:
Because PDF 2.0 is only beginning to be used by the industry, and
Because PDF/UA-2 has not yet been released, and
Because assistive technology manufacturers have not yet adopted these new
versions of the standards and retooled their A T to use them, and
Because content creation software such as Word, Adobe InDesign, and Adobe
Acrobat are in the process of building PDF/UA-2 tools for us to use to meet
these new standards, and
Because the U S federal regulation called Sec. 508 specifies PDF/UA-1 (and
WCAG 2.0), not a future standard that hasn't even been finished yet, and
Because when the new standards are in place and working, assistive
technologies will have to still be required to read and process PDFs made to
the current PDF/UA-1 standards, (whew!)
We recommend (at this time):
-- tagging the caption as <Caption> when possible, but <P> will be
sufficient.
-- placing the <Caption> outside and before or after the <Figure> tag
because, at this time, some of our A T tests can't process a caption nested
inside a <Figure> tag. Heck, some of our A T don't recognize the Caption tag
at all!
(Personally, I try to put the caption before the figure in the tag order,
based on known educational pedagogies of telling someone what you're about
to tell them, but that's not always possible. In many cases it doesn't make
sense to have the user hear the complex Alt-Text and then get the caption
information. Switch those around if you think it will be more easily
comprehended.)
It's too soon to put PDF/UA-2 into practice; the pieces of the accessibility
puzzle are controlled by many different stakeholders. The standards must be
finalized first, then they must be adopted by governments around the world,
then the assistive technology manufacturers and content authoring
manufacturers must rebuild their tools to the new standards, and then,
finally, we have the most important stakeholder group, our colleagues who
use assistive technologies.
That is a large number of ducks that have to become aligned in a row to make
a new standard the norm!
That's my 2 cents' worth.
--Bevi
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Bevi Chagnon, founder/CEO | <EMAIL REMOVED>
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PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing
consulting . training . development . design . sec. 508 services
Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes
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