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RE: questions about accessible pdfs

for

From: John Foliot - WATS.ca
Date: Mar 1, 2004 4:06PM

>
> Well, kids, Jukka has spoken.
>

Thus spoke the authority - Joe Clark

>
> 1. keep PDF an inaccessible format that doesn't work with screen readers
> 2. upgrade PDF and screen readers

Well Joe, once *every* user agent and platform provides universal support to
PDFs , well then, yes, I suppose PDFs can be made accessible... sort of.

Joe's a funny guy. Sometimes he'll rail on and on about how you really
should do this that or the other (get him going about Top Posting), and
then, other times, if it doesn't fit within his definition of good or bad,
well, out comes the sarcastic knives.

Hey Joe, perhaps some of us actually consider the current W3C Recommendation
to only use W3C approved technologies as being reasonable: [Priority 2 -
11.1: Use W3C technologies when they are available and appropriate for a
task and use the latest versions when supported.] I don't recall PDFs being
a W3C technology, do you? Must be a conspiracy...

Visit Joe's site... he's big into captioning too. He complains though about
the multitude of ways that it's done... I get the impression that if *only*
the big movie studios could get their act together and provide a universal
method of captioning...

Now, I've actually sat in on the Adobe conference (coming to a convention
hall near you), and, well yes, if you do everything your supposed to do
right in your authoring environment, then yes, you can turn out reasonably
decent, 98 times out of 100, accessible "documents". As a matter of fact,
you can even produce 5000 "page" accessible PDFs, although the download time
would be a b*tch. But what I don't get is: if you go to all of that trouble
to produce a master document that can then be converted into an accessible
PDF, why not just make it an HTML document as well? For the PDF document to
be accessible, it needs semantic structure, which means that when authoring
in oh, say, MS Word, you need to use the "styles" built into Word - Heading
1 (= < h1> for example)

>
> Adobe, Freedom Scientific, GW Micro, and Dolphin chose option 2. Of
> course you the user have to upgrade. Upgrades are inevitable online.
> You can't complain that PDF was inaccessible and then ignore the fact
> that PDFs and screen readers were upgraded *to be* accessible. You
> can't critique the manufacturers for shirking their responsibilities
> when, later, they took on those responsibilities.
>
> Also, several programs output tagged PDFs automatically (among them
> Word 2000, InDesign, PageMaker, and FrameMaker); if you already have
> those programs or were going to buy them anyway, the added cost and
> learning curve are small to nil. (Word2K is trickiest, since you must
> use certain defined styles and add alt texts yourself.)

ya, and they output HTML too. Funny eh?

>
> We are at merely the second version of a general authoring tool that
> can produce tagged PDFs.

Authoring tool? Conversion tool perhaps, editing tool - OK, but authoring
tool? I can't claim to be an expert here, but I've never seen a document
authored in Acrobat, only converted from an original file format to PDF.

> Acrobat 5 was the first, Acrobat 6 the
> second.) Acrobat 6.01 is already significantly better than 6.0,
> according to Adobe. (I don't see any detailed release notes for
> public consumption, but the abstract to a CSUN paper states that 6.01
> has improvements:
> <http://www.csun.edu/cod/conf/2004/proceedings/213.htm>;.) Later tools
> will become better still. Remember, it took approximately forever to
> prod Adobe and Macromedia into making HTML tools that could produce
> valid code. We're still in our infancy here, but many things are
> possible already.

And Dreamweaver MX *still* requires an experienced, knowledgeable user to
achieve any semblance of accessible. Heck, a default Dreamweaver MX
document still lacks a <!DOCTYPE> declaration. But I digress...

>
> I *just*... *don't*... *get it*.

Finally... Joe and I agree on something...


JF



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