Re: Misinterpretation of list of assistive technologies and versions supporting PDF techniques

On Thu, Sep 8, 2011 at 4:40 AM,  <noreply@w3.org> wrote:
>
> Name: Andrew Arch
> Email: andrew.arch@finance.gov.au
> Affiliation: Australian Government Information Management Office
> Document: TD
> Item Number: (none selected)
> Part of Item: Description
> Comment Type: technical
> Summary of Issue: Misinterpretation of list of assistive technologies and versions supporting PDF techniques
> Comment (Including rationale for any proposed change):
> Readers may interpret this list as ‘only these versions and later’ support PDF accessibility.
>
> Proposed Change:
> AGIMO requests urgent clarification on the versions of the assistive technologies (AT)
> that fully or partially support PDF accessibility through the proposed Techniques. This is
> already done, in part, for WindowEyes.
>
> To assist organisations and governments establish when PDF is suitably “Accessibility
> Supported” (http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20/#accessibility-supporteddef) for their
> audience, a table of AT version by PDF techniques is highly desirable. This table may
> only require a few versions older than the current release, where applicable (i.e. support is
> available in those releases).
>
> It will be difficult for the Australian Government to determine the use of PDF as a
> WCAG 2.0 conforming technology, under the definition of Accessibility Support for our
> jurisdiction, without this clarification.
>
>
================================
Response from the Working Group
================================
As with our other techniques, we have attempted to describe known user
agent and AT support issues with current versions of those tools.
Maintaining an accessibility support database is outside the scope of
the WCAG WG charter (http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2010/06/charter),
particularly given the wide variance in available user agents and
assistive technology in different parts of the world. We hope an
effort could emerge to share accessibility support information among
authors, to relieve the burden of assuring that they are using
techniques that are supported for their users. The examples in the PDF
techniques link to PDF files that may be used for testing the
techniques.

Loretta Guarino Reid, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Gregg Vanderheiden, WCAG WG Co-Chair
Michael Cooper, WCAG WG Staff Contact


On behalf of the WCAG Working Group

Received on Friday, 30 September 2011 01:59:21 UTC