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Using the accessibility features of Acrobat

for

From: Wayne Dick
Date: May 31, 2006 1:20PM

After the big discussion of Acrobat
earlier this year, I thoutht was time
to buy the software and see what it
can do.

First, Adobe is really serious about
accessibility. That being said I'm
having trouble with a couple of
things.

Problems with Authoring:
1) Acrobat added a some uninvited
stuff to my MS Word menuand it takes
more space than it is worth in my
large print environment. How do I
ditch that stuff?
2) In Acrobat the menus don't conform
to my Windows size preferences so I
can see the items. Can they be
enlarged?
3) The documentation is small and it
doesn't come up in the regular player,
so I can't make it big enough to see
without horizantal scrolling. How can
I fix that?
4) I can't see the Preference menu.
Is a screen manifier or reader the
only option?

Problems with Browsing:
5) The Adobe reader voice is very
slow! Can I speed it up?
6) I don't seem to be able to spread
out the spacing between lines, letters
and words on documents I pull off the
web. For many partially sighted and
dyslexic individuals this is very
important. Is there a fix for this?
7) Size and color control are very
nice, but sometimes authors use fonts
that are difficult at best to read.
Can I re-style the fonts of
reasonably structured documents?
8) Since my web based assistive
technology only reads world wide web
technologies, I do a lot of saving
into markup language. Acrobat saves
to HTML 4.01, but it doesn't behave
all that well. Are there better tools
for converting to HTML, XHTML or XML?

I would really like answers to these
questions because I'm trying to
develop a style guide for faculty and
staff at my university that will help
them produce well structured PDF
documents for campus distribution.

Thank You,

Wayne Dick PhD
Chair Computer Engineering and
Computer Science
Director WebAdapt2Me Project at CSULB