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Re: questions about accessible pdfs

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Feb 25, 2004 11:58AM

On Wed, 25 Feb 2004, Joe Clark wrote:

> This discussion is already a major step up from the typical
> shibboleth that "PDFs are not accessible!" which I am a bit tired of.

I thought the common shibboleth was either "we need to use PDF" or
"in Adobe we trust" (including Adobe's marketese about accessibility
enhancements).

PDF is a serious obstacle to the majority, so the finer points of removing
some specific impediments relevant to minorities aren't that essential in
the big picture. Besides, those finer points require not only that authors
invest money and learning time to buy versions of Adobe Acrobat but also
that users have programs that can utilize the new features.

As long as it is common experience that clicking on a link to a PDF page
produces a _long_ wait and then perhaps a white window, perhaps IE crash,
perhaps system crash, and sometimes a display of a document in a rigid
format, I will keep saying "PDFs are not accessible". This probably means
as long as PDF is PDF (Printable Document Format - your may have heard
just the other, official, expansion).

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/


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