WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

RE: questions about accessible pdfs

for

From: Joe Clark
Date: Mar 2, 2004 8:12AM

>> Well, kids, Jukka has spoken.
>
>Thus spoke the authority-- Joe Clark

On some topics, I indeed am.

>>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.

I disagree with any suggestion that the sole format for every
document must be HTML. Other file formats exist for various reasons
that you need not agree with. And all of them need to be made
accessible. It is of course axiomatic that the mere use of HTML
automatically ensures accessibility, is it not?

>Joe's a funny guy.

A laff-riot, actually! You don't know the half of it!

>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.

I'm available in only one model.

>Hey Joe, perhaps some of us actually consider the current W3C
>Recommendation to only use W3C approved technologies as being
>reasonable:

Ah, yes, a standards body stating that only its technologies are
kosher. That makes a lot of sense-- to them.

>[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...

Oh, I know! That's why WAI published actual guidelines for creating
accessible PDFs!

<http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/WCAG-PDF-TECHS-20010913/Overview.html>;

The conspiracy is *busted*!

>Visit Joe's site... he's big into captioning too. He complains
>though about the multitude of ways that it's done...

Multitude of ways it's *mis*done, shurely?!

> I get the impression that if *only* the big movie studios could get
>their act together and provide a universal method of captioning...

Oh, I want universal methods from more than just the movie studios.
(Another conspiracy *busted*!)

>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,

(not in any way similar to having to do everything right in your HTML
authoring environment)

>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?

You can.

> For the PDF document to be accessible, it needs semantic structure,

That's not strictly true. Just as you can produce an HTML document
where every bit of text is marked up as <p>, you can do the same in
Acrobat. It's not correct, but it's not necessarily inaccessible.
(Acrobat is somewhat more flexible than HTML in that it has numbered
heading elements plus the generic <h> element, a feature we expect to
see in XHTML 2.0.)

Also, Acrobat 5 and 6 can muddle through some untagged documents with
reasonable success. (There was also an Acrobat 4 plug-in for Windows
with a similar ability.) A tagged PDF, of which I have created many,
gives the highest assurance of accessibility, but it is not per se
necessary.

>Yeah, and they output HTML too. Funny eh?

They output shitty HTML, yes. But of course any HTML is automatically
accessible, right?

>> 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.

That still makes it an authoring tool.

<http://www.w3.org/TR/ATAG10/#def-authoring-tool>;

>> Authoring Tool
>> An "authoring tool" is any software that is used to produce
>> content for publishing on the Web. Authoring tools include:
>>
>> + Editing tools specifically designed to produce Web content
>> (e.g., WYSIWYG HTML and XML editors);
>> + Tools that offer the option of saving material in a Web
>> format (e.g., word processors or desktop publishing
>> packages);
>> + Tools that transform documents into Web formats (e.g.,
>> filters to transform desktop publishing formats to HTML);
>> + Tools that produce multimedia, especially where it is
>> intended for use on the Web (e.g., video production and
>> editing suites, SMIL authoring packages);
>> + Tools for site management or site publication, including
>> tools that automatically generate Web sites dynamically from
>> a database, on-the-fly conversion and Web site publishing
>> tools;
>> + Tools for management of layout (e.g., CSS formatting tools).

Two people I know from Adobe are on the ATAG Working Group.

>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...

Indeed you do!

Thanks ever so much for trying, John.
--

Joe Clark | <EMAIL REMOVED> | <http://joeclark.org/access/>;
Author, _Building Accessible Websites_ | <http://joeclark.org/book/>;
Expect criticism if you top-post


----
To subscribe, unsubscribe, suspend, or view list archives,
visit http://www.webaim.org/discussion/