Re: PDFs and accessibility

> follow when converted into HTML by the Adobe conversion tools. Thus I am 
> looking at other options now...

Going from PDF to HTML is not a sensible direction as PDF is more final
form than HTML.  It will only work from an accessibility point of view
if the PDF was tagged (and not just tagged by a machine).  It then 
becomes arguable as to whether it would not be better to use the
latest Acrobat reader and skip a step.

However, Word does not output structure information (or even hyperlinks)
in its Posctscript, so you are not going to get good tagged PDF from
Word.   You probably need to use RTF as the starting point, and may run
into commercial restrictions on the use of its specification.  Also, this
all depends on people using Word well - most people have a tag soup,
WYSIWYG, way of working with Word, and do not use styles, tab round 
line ends, empty paragraph over page boundaries, etc.

There is an html2ps tool (actually used to create the PDF of the HTML
4 specification) that can convert the other way for well structured 
documents.

Received on Friday, 17 January 2003 16:28:47 UTC