E-mail List Archives

Search E-mail List Archives for

Number of posts in this thread: 5 (In chronological order)

From: Miriam Fukushima
Date: Fri, Nov 25 2022 5:56AM
Subject: PDF library
No previous message | Next message →

Hello everyone,

I'm a webdeveloper and I was wondering if there is any library that
renders a PDF reader in the browser that is accessible.

Does anyone know of anything or any experiences with any libraries or as
a user?


--
Kind regards

Miriam Fukushima
- Entwicklung / Barrierefreiheit -
- Development / Accessibility -

---------------------------------------------------
GLAMUS
Gesellschaft für moderne Kommunikation mbH
Gartenstr. 24, 53229 Bonn
http://www.glamus.de/ mailto: = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Tel: +49 228 97617-75 Fax: +49 228 97617-55

HRB: Bonn 6287
Geschäftsführer: Ulrich Santo - Gerhard Loosch
---------------------------------------------------

From: Steve Green
Date: Fri, Nov 25 2022 6:51AM
Subject: Re: PDF library
← Previous message | Next message →

There are very few libraries that generate tagged PDFs. JasperReports is Java based and produces tagged PDFs. There is a free open source version and a paid-for product owned by Tibco.

A third-party developer used it for one of our clients. They certainly made it look difficult, and the results were poor. I don't know if these are intrinsic problems or if the developers were not very good (they are one of the giant Indian IT companies, so this is very possible).

One of the problems they said was insoluble is that you cannot artifact anything, so all the page headers and footers appear in the middle of the content. This is bad enough, but when a table spanned two or more pages, the page header and footer appeared in the middle of the table, destroying its structure.

There is also Aspose for .NET. It claims to produce tagged PDFs but I have no experience of it.

If you find a good solution, I have a stack of clients who would like to know.

There are also a few services that connect via an API, which has the benefit that they are independent of your technology stack. Also, you don't have to do any development other than building your end of the API. You send the data to them and they send back a tagged PDF.

Commonlook have two such products. Commonlook Dynamic is best if your PDFs are heavily templated and it's only the data that changes. AI Cloud is more appropriate if the document structure is more variable. Both incur an on-going cost and are sufficiently expensive that none of our clients have implemented them.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd

From: Miriam Fukushima
Date: Fri, Nov 25 2022 7:01AM
Subject: Re: PDF library
← Previous message | Next message →

Thank you so much for the information!

I guessed as much. It's one thing to look at PDFs in Adobe and another
thing on the web, let alone the accessibility of the PDF itself.

How would it be, if we say, we produce PDF/UA valid PDFs and would also
teach the client how to write accessible PDF content and mark it up
correctly: What about viewers in the browser as Javascript libraries?
How accessible are the Browsers PDF-viewers and does anyone have any
experience with any PDF-Javascript libraries for viewing PDFs embedded
in the Website?


Thank you so much for any shared experiences,
Miriam Fukushima

On 25/11/2022 14:51, Steve Green wrote:
> There are very few libraries that generate tagged PDFs. JasperReports is Java based and produces tagged PDFs. There is a free open source version and a paid-for product owned by Tibco.
>
> A third-party developer used it for one of our clients. They certainly made it look difficult, and the results were poor. I don't know if these are intrinsic problems or if the developers were not very good (they are one of the giant Indian IT companies, so this is very possible).
>
> One of the problems they said was insoluble is that you cannot artifact anything, so all the page headers and footers appear in the middle of the content. This is bad enough, but when a table spanned two or more pages, the page header and footer appeared in the middle of the table, destroying its structure.
>
> There is also Aspose for .NET. It claims to produce tagged PDFs but I have no experience of it.
>
> If you find a good solution, I have a stack of clients who would like to know.
>
> There are also a few services that connect via an API, which has the benefit that they are independent of your technology stack. Also, you don't have to do any development other than building your end of the API. You send the data to them and they send back a tagged PDF.
>
> Commonlook have two such products. Commonlook Dynamic is best if your PDFs are heavily templated and it's only the data that changes. AI Cloud is more appropriate if the document structure is more variable. Both incur an on-going cost and are sufficiently expensive that none of our clients have implemented them.
>
> Steve Green
> Managing Director
> Test Partners Ltd
>
>
>

From: Steve Green
Date: Fri, Nov 25 2022 7:28AM
Subject: Re: PDF library
← Previous message | Next message →

PDF/UA conformance is only the start, and it's a long way short of WCAG 2.1 AA conformance, which can be achieved with most PDFs. Some aspects of conformance are easy, but full conformance isn't.

We tested an embedded PDF viewer last week and it was absolutely fine. As far as I can tell, it was https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/. It looked the same as the demo at https://mozilla.github.io/pdf.js/web/viewer.html, although the styling was different.

Steve

From: Steve Green
Date: Sat, Nov 26 2022 6:09AM
Subject: Re: PDF library
← Previous message | No next message

It's worth making the distinction between delivering a PDF to a browser and embedding a PDF in a reader in a page. When you deliver a PDF to a browser, the behaviour is under the user's control, at least in most browsers. By default the PDF will open in the browser, but you can change the browser settings so the PDF opens in your preferred application instead.

By contrast, if you embed a PDF in a reader in a page, it will always display that way. However, every embedded reader I have seen has a button that allows you to download the PDF and open it in your preferred application.

Steve