Re: PDF accessibility guidelines. WAS: Re: PDF's and Signatures

but to the average person they put a document on a scanner (or scan it 
from a computer document) export it as a pdf and add it as an "attachment" 
in or after a document.  fast, simple, easy, but not very accessible.

got a full time IT dept yes it can be done but it is still not intuitive 
to the common user.  who more and more is not within the 
business/education community.

in a couple minutes I can take pretty much anything, scan it on a $100 
flatbed scanner, then send the result as an exported pdf document anywhere 
on the web.  or even worse send a scanned text document as a jpg. but we 
are not talking about that.

Bob


On Mon, 26 Jan 2015, David Woolley wrote:

> Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 15:48:31 +0000
> From: David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk>
> To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> Subject: Re: PDF accessibility guidelines. WAS: Re: PDF's and Signatures
> Resent-Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 15:48:39 +0000
> Resent-From: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> 
> On 26/01/15 15:15, accessys@smart.net wrote:
>> 
>> the simple basic fact is that a pdf is a "photo" or "image" of a
>> document and no matter what is shown it is still treated or should be
>> treated the same as any other image in a document.
>
> PDF's created from machine readable sources are much deeper than photographs. 
> From the typical business users point of view this is reflected in the fact 
> that you can print them at arbitrary high resolutions.  As I already noted, 
> it is the image like property of producing exactly the same layout in every 
> medium that makes them attractive (both to people who want to maintain a 
> house style, and to people who want to reproduce technical documents without 
> thinking about the deep structure).
>
> In W3C terms, PDF is similar to SVG.  Both can embed bit map scans, but they 
> are basically both vector plus text formats.  With the right authoring tools, 
> text can be very easy to retrieve from PDF, but, in practice, word-processors 
> micro-space the text and then encode the result as individual, micro-spaced, 
> characters, rather than as a string, with associated spacing hints, even 
> though PDF has allowed the latter for a very long time.
>

Received on Monday, 26 January 2015 16:58:33 UTC