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Thread: pdf documents
Number of posts in this thread: 4 (In chronological order)
From: Nathan Clark
Date: Tue, Apr 25 2023 8:11AM
Subject: pdf documents
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Dear List,
I know this question has been asked before but
can blind screen reader users independently remediate pdf documents? Thanks.
Sincerely,
Nathan Clark
From: Steve Green
Date: Tue, Apr 25 2023 9:21AM
Subject: Re: pdf documents
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You can do some thing on your own, you can do some things with help and there are some things you can't do at all. It also depends on the level of accessibility you need to achieve. If you need to fully meet PDF/UA and WCAG 2.1 AA, there will be a lot of things you can't do. And that's when everything is working optimally. There are plenty of times when even a sighted document remediator has difficulty working out what is happening and what to do about it.
Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd
From: David Russell
Date: Tue, Apr 25 2023 12:30PM
Subject: Re: (webaim) RE PDF Documents
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Hello List,
I would concur with what Steve Green stated in his post from my experience.
At one time, PDF documents were difficult to access. Now, PDF
documents are occasionally not accessible but only thumbnails are
stated by my NVDA screen reader as I down arrow. Subsequent pages - 1,
2, 3, are read, too but nothing pertinent to the document.
I prefer utilizing RTF documents or MS Word docs as a reader and
writer of fiction.
The adage, "good enough for Government work" is an apt descriptive of
the PDF from my point of view. Thanks!
--
David C. Russell, Author
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From: Karen McCall
Date: Wed, Apr 26 2023 10:35AM
Subject: Re: pdf documents
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The main problem/barrier for someone who is totally blind in remediating PDFS independently is that you have to be able to see the page in order to determine whether the content on the page has been tagged and whether the content has been tagged correctly.
For example, as someone who uses a screen reader but has a visual disability, I can still see the page. As I go down the Tags Tree and see the corresponding content highlighted, I can identify any content that is not tagged. I can hear my screen reader announce the tag and determine if the tag is correct for the type of content. I can see if something is supposed to be a paragraph or a heading.
Screen readers depend on the tags to be able to "read" a PDF so if there is part of a page/document that is not tagged, it is not read so someone who is not able to see the page/document doesn't know it is missing unless the content flow doesn't make sense.
While there are some things that someone depending on a screen reader alone can do, it is impossible to remediate PDFs without the use of some vision. It is the nature of the PDF format.
Remediating PDFs is matching tags with content and making sure that the tags are in a logical reading order which may not be the visually represented order on a page or in the document as a whole.
Cheers, Karen