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Re: PDF access (was Screen-reader updates)

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From: Martin Pistorius
Date: Mar 1, 2006 6:30AM

Hi All,

I've been following this discussion about the accessibility of PDFs and
there is no doubt that its a big issue. My question is other than converting
the document into plain HTML what other options are there?
I ask this with a particular reason and that is from my limited experience,
I only get asked to PDF documents and even PowerPoints for 1 simple reason
to attempt to protect the authors content. PDFs do have the advantage that
if they are protected you can even prevent someone from printing them. So
what I really would like to know is how do you achieve the same sort of
security without using PDFs?

I manage a site at a University so if you can give me another way to protect
the authors content that is accessible without using PDF I honestly don't
see a need for me to ever use PDFs again.

Best wish,

Martin Pistorius

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jukka K. Korpela" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
To: "WebAIM Discussion List" < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Sent: Wednesday, March 01, 2006 8:16 AM
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PDF access (was Screen-reader updates)


> On Tue, 28 Feb 2006, Joe Clark wrote:
>
>>> PDF is the worst offender in this category.
>>
>> Hardly.
>>
>> Tried to read a Visio file lately?
>
> I never encountered a Visio file on the Web, or on a CD-rom.
>
> PDF is one of the top five accessibility problems (obstacles), since it is
> so widespread and causes serious problems to so many different groups of
> people. Even people who have no particular disability frequently encounter
> problems with PDF, starting from the fact that opening a PDF file takes
> much longer than opening an HTML document with comparable content.
> It all too often freezes the browser, and this is not just an
> inconvenience if the user does not see or does not understand what is
> happening. It also prevents changing font face and size. (Zooming should
> not be confused with font size changing.)
>
> Several recommendations have warned against using PDF as the only format
> for delivering information on the Web, but its use has grown a lot,
> and the recommendations are being watered down.
>
> The reason is simple: when first priority is to have documents _printed_
> (and when people are used to using tools that generate PDF), just putting
> PDF files on the Web is a simple way of dealing with the dual publishing
> problem. The publisher does not care about the implications and does not
> even see them. Besides, he can present excuses like references to Adobe
> statements that say that PDF is OK.
>
> This is more or less the answer you'll get from the officials if you get
> any answer when asking questions like "your recommendations say that
> PDF-only material is no-no, so why do you have so much PDF-only material
> on your site?"
>
> --
> Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
>
>
>