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Thread: Wait, wait...who has to abide by Sec. 508?
Number of posts in this thread: 6 (In chronological order)
From: chagnon
Date: Fri, Apr 19 2019 10:40AM
Subject: Wait, wait...who has to abide by Sec. 508?
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Leaving the hot potato politics out of this discussion, the actual Mueller
report was officially published by the Department of Justice. It is 448
pages of scanned text, not OCR'd, tagged, or accessible in any way.
Question: Is the Department of Justice, the agency that houses the ADA
office, exempt from meeting the Section 508 requirements for accessible
public-facing ICT?
No politics, just your thoughts about who's covered by the law.
You can view DOJ's official published version here:
https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf Warning: we do not recommend
this version for those who use text-to-speech A T unless you want to make it
accessible yourself.
But many news outlets have republished the report with live, searchable,
accessible text. The New York Times' version is good, located at
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/18/us/politics/mueller-report-do
cument.html
-Bevi
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consulting . training . development . design . sec. 508 services
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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Fri, Apr 19 2019 10:47AM
Subject: Re: Wait, wait...who has to abide by Sec. 508?
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< = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
>
> Leaving the hot potato politics out of this discussion, the actual Mueller
> report was officially published by the Department of Justice. It is 448
> pages of scanned text, not OCR'd, tagged, or accessible in any way.
Indeed.
The PDF Association posted on this point earlier today:
https://www.pdfa.org/a-technical-and-cultural-assessment-of-the-mueller-report-pdf/
Duff.
From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Fri, Apr 19 2019 12:24PM
Subject: Re: Wait, wait...who has to abide by Sec. 508?
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> Leaving the hot potato politics out of this discussion, the actual Mueller report was officially published by the Department of Justice. It is 448 pages of scanned text, not OCR'd, tagged, or accessible in any way.
I've heard it's a common practice in litigation as well to delivery OCR'd documents without tags to make it more difficult for the other side to search digital information during discovery. So -- seems like a tactic to make it more difficult to find and analyze the data. I could also imagine that there might be some misunderstandings about redaction and PDF tags that could trigger concerns by those releasing redacted content.
Jonathan
From: Duff Johnson
Date: Fri, Apr 19 2019 12:33PM
Subject: Re: Wait, wait...who has to abide by Sec. 508?
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> I've heard it's a common practice in litigation as well to delivery OCR'd documents without tags to make it more difficult for the other side to search digital information during discovery. So -- seems like a tactic to make it more difficult to find and analyze the data. I could also imagine that there might be some misunderstandings about redaction and PDF tags that could trigger concerns by those releasing redacted content.
That's all true; it's a (lamentably) common practice in litigation.
However in this case it's clearly DoJ's job to know about those matters… and to know that there's no problem or concern with redacting tagged PDF. Redacted is redacted.
Sadly, we've yet to see developers supporting the new features in PDF 2.0 that explicitly enable accessible redaction… but if people do as the DoJ did - trash their PDFs by rendering them as images - then tags are kind of irrelevant.
Duff.
From: chagnon
Date: Fri, Apr 19 2019 1:47PM
Subject: Re: Wait, wait...who has to abide by Sec. 508?
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Just because it's common practice doesn't give the legal community a valid excuse for doing it. It'll probably take a high-profile lawsuit to get the legal community to make their documents accessible.
And with his particular report, DOJ's Mueller Report, it's a public-facing document created by a federal agency so it's covered by Sec. 508. They are not above the law.
â â â
Bevi Chagnon, founder/CEO | = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
â â â
PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing
consulting ' training ' development ' design ' sec. 508 services
Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes
â â â
Latest blog-newsletter â Accessibility Tips at www.PubCom.com/blog
From: Karlen Communications
Date: Fri, Apr 19 2019 4:46PM
Subject: Re: Wait, wait...who has to abide by Sec. 508?
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I hate to bring up the dreaded "R"" word (redaction) but are the ISO committees working with AT developers to ensure that when PDF - 2 and PDF/UA - 2 are adopted as part of legislation, that those of us who use adaptive technology can benefit from the plethora of attributes, metadata and so forth?
It is difficult to support and advocate for something when the "standards" say "you have access to this" and the reality is that we don't.
In terms of redactions, we need to know how much has been redacted...visually you can tell if it is a word or two, part of a line, a line, part of a paragraph, paragraphs, pages...in order to understand what we are reading, we need to know exactly what is available visually so that we don't start troubleshooting our technology, thinking it is skipping over things.
Are the PDF/PDF/UA committees working with the government and legal community to support tagged PDF with redactions? To help them understand the security and the need?
Cheers, Karen