WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

PDF format and public policies

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Sep 21, 2004 4:18PM

On Tue, 21 Sep 2004, julian.rickards wrote:

> Jukka wrote:
>
> "I'm especially thinking about the governmental organizations that keep
> publishing papers that nominally preach accessibility to others and that are
> only available in PDF.)"
>
> If you were discretely pointing at me, I raise my hand in acknowledgement.

No, was pointing at organizations such as the European Parliament (which
first published its accessibility recommendations as PDF only) and many
other organizations, most recently (to my knowledge) the ministry of
transport and communications in Finland, which recently published, for
public review, a draft recommendations on accessibility - as PDF only.
It also calls for simple and easy language, but itself uses the usual
administrative jargon throughout.

The absolute absurdity is in publishing recommendations on accessibility
in a strongly inaccessible format, even when the recommendations
themselves say that such formats shall not be used as the only format. And
this seems to be the rule rather than the exception.

So, you see, I'm rather pessimistic about the situation. The more
governments produce "recommendations" on accessibility, the more
inaccessible their own pages become. I think it's just a game to them, and
a way of keeping some administrative people busy. And they _don't_ get the
point even if you take the trouble of explaining things to them, things
that they should have known long before they started writing
recommendations to others; but they surely can digest Adobe marketese and
say "but PDF is accessible now" in a chorus.

Compared to that, it's really peanuts if you use PDF as the quick and
dirty way of publishing documents that are not crucial to the general
public, especially if you recognize the problems and do some real work
towards using accessible formats.

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