Re: Comments on PDF Techniques doc

A quick response to one of Wendy's comments:

The division between WCAG and Authoring Tools has always been, as I
understand it, approximately as follows: WCAG defines what the correct
markup/data representation should be; AU defines how an authoring tool
should prompt the user, what checks it should perform on the document for
the purpose of validating accessibility, etc.

Thus in so far as the PDF techniques are intended to explain what is meant
by an accessible PDF file (how content should be represented in it), they
belong within the scope of WCAG. Although PDF is generally produced by
tools rather than direct keyboard entry, this is no reason to move the PDF
techniques out of our working group's scope. Perhaps it should be stated
in the document, clearly, that the techniques will be most relevant to the
designers of PDF output software. On the other hand, there are web authors
who will be using widely available libraries to generate PDF
automatically, in which case the library will shield them from the
syntactic details of the file format while still exposing the constructs
that make up a PDF file.

Actually, it would be possible to write a fully functional PDF file by
hand in a text editor, even though no one does this in practice.

Received on Wednesday, 16 May 2001 20:20:20 UTC