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Re: Does anyone know if a new PAC checker is coming out?

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From: Karen McCall
Date: May 2, 2023 3:57AM

Morning!

Keep in mind that ISO 32000 or PDF - 2 is for developers, machines and not humans. While chapter 14 does deal with tags, it is written for the developers of PDF conversion/creation software and not for those of us who remediate PDFs...not for humans.

We can't rely on automated tools alone to determine whether a PDF is accessible or not for those with disabilities.

An example relates to the question I recently asked about MCIDs (marked-content IDs). Some automated checkers are giving this error with no context or suggestion on how to remediate this. Is it a valid error? Does it affect how the adaptive technology reads the PDF or is this MCID, which is an integer in the code, something we really need to pay attention to? Shouldn't the developers of PDF software have created the code in their software to automatically fix this when combining PDFs?

We need to move forward with caution when looking at and trying to read ISO 32000 and take it as the definitive starting point or ending point for accessible PDFs.

It is written for programmers, not remediators.

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Laura Roberts
Sent: Monday, May 1, 2023 10:51 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] Does anyone know if a new PAC checker is coming out?

The current one is PAC 2021. Just wondering if a new one is coming out anytime soon.

Are there any plans to remove the failure for link annotations? (As was discussed previously with a great comment by Bevi Chagnon.)

I haven't had time to look through the new PDF ISO 2.0 to see if any major changes were made that would affect the current checker.

--
Best regards,
Laura Roberts
413-588-8422