RE: 'Non-economic' rationale for backward compatibility

In terms of Acrobat files however, even Acrobat 5.0 suffers from a
certain lack of manipulability (for want of a better word).  It is not
possible to, say for example, turn all the images off (which would
decrease download time)

Also this brings us back to the problem of file download and sizes -
instead of opening a page, the user is required to download information
which may be many hundreds of pages long. This poses a problem for
people using modems (any kind of modem) instead of broadband (and even
for people using broadband if it is a particularly large file). It
causes problems for regional users (and their electric fences for those
OzeWAI attendees).  It costs more to the user.

And in order for people to access these PDF files they need the latest
version of Jaws. As Jaws retails at several thousand dollars (depending
on which currency), this isn't something that people will do every year.

And to Cynthia's analogy- yes we require that people have their own
assistive technology, whether it be a wheelchair or a screen-reader. But
we don't make a ramp that only motorised wheelchairs can climb, and tell
the people who use their wheelchairs manually to come back when they
have some more money.

Gian

> -----Original Message-----
> From: lguarino [mailto:lguarino@adobe.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, 19 March 2002 5:32 AM
> To: Gian Sampson-Wild
> Cc: w3c-wai-gl
> Subject: Re: 'Non-economic' rationale for backward compatibility
> 
> 
> In Acrobat 5, this user would control the background and text 
> colors by 
> setting them in the Accessibility Preferences panel. And 
> Acrobat has always 
> supported magnification of the entire page, just not the text 
> separately from 
> the rest of the contents. If the PDF file has been marked up 
> appropriately for 
> accessibility (that is, it is a Tagged PDF), the user will 
> also be able to 
> reflow the contents of the page, making it much easier to 
> read at large 
> magnfications.
> 
> These are features of the Acrobat 5 User Agent, of course, 
> which gets us back 
> to the problems of backwards compatability.
> 
>     Loretta
> 
> 
> > OK- good point. Another example is that PDFs are not 
> manipulable (for
> > want of a better term).  Someone with vision impairment 
> that browses in
> > point 34 font and white text on a black background will find the PDF
> > inaccessible.
> 
> 
>