- From: Jason White <jasonw@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au>
- Date: Thu, 17 May 2001 10:20:10 +1000 (EST)
- To: Wendy A Chisholm <wendy@w3.org>
- cc: ryladog@earthlink.net, kshea@apollo.fedworld.gov, lguarino@Adobe.COM, w3c-wai-gl@w3.org, Charles McCathieNevile <charles@w3.org>
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