Re: TIFF as accessibility option

> JSTOR is a not-for-profit organisation that maintains an archive of 
> scholarly journals. Journal articles are presented as one web page 

A likely problem is that they are working at the limits of what the
original journal publishers will permit, i.e. there may be a conflict
between commercial and accesibility considerations.  Having machine
readable text significantly increases the value to the recipient, even
when there is no disability issue.

This is likely to be getting worse on the general web as it is now
quite common for companies to use scripting to try and prevent
copy and paste or access to source (although these obviously fail
when scripting is off, but their web designers probably didn't tell
them that, or design to work in that mode).

> Option - TIFF Format". The PDF contains the text of the article in 
> the form of scanned images. There are no plain text or HTML-versions 

I believe the proper Adobe tools can produce an OCRed underlay for the
scans.  Can you confirm that none has been included. (Note that
modern PDFs can be flagged as allowing access to the text for 
accessibility, but not for cut and paste.)   Actually, most
vaguely recently published journals are available as proper PDFs, so,
if they are using scans, rather than PDF rendered to a bitmap, they
may have very nobbled access to the originals.

Received on Saturday, 10 March 2007 19:02:00 UTC