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Formal Techniques for Accessible PDF

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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Jan 7, 2025 12:22PM

All,

As we know, digital accessibility depends on a very high degree of common understanding between software developers and end users. Over a decade ago, W3C's WCAG led the way on answering this problem with its own Techniques for web content accessibility.

The project to develop the PDF industry's own Techniques for Accessible PDF was launched in Edinburgh, Scotland in December, 2018. Since then, the PDF Association's PDF Accessibility LWG has met in hundreds of weekly meetings to develop the model and craft the first tranche of Techniques, now posted.

https://pdfa.org/techniques-for-accessible-pdf/

Each Technique is posted with atomic, but fully-functional PDF files representing pass and fail cases. The Techniques are provided with test-procedures and a "Technique Support Finder" - a means of very easily identifying vendors and documentation referencing these Techniques.

Dozens of additional Techniques are in the pipeline covering every common use case - from lists and tables to annotations and math. These will be released on a quarterly basis.

Comments and questions are welcome via the (freshly-posted) public GitHub repo created to support this project:

https://github.com/pdf-association/techniques-for-accessible-pdf
<https://github.com/pdf-association/techniques-for-accessible-pdf>

Thank you,


Duff Johnson

PDF Association, CEO
https://www.pdfa.org

p +1.617 283 4226
e <EMAIL REMOVED>
l http://www.linkedin.com/in/duffjohnson/

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