Re: Web Authoring Tools that are Both Accessible and Produce Accessible Content

Hi All,

At 08:14 AM 5/10/00 -0500, you wrote:
>While I think 100 percent accessibility is a noble goal, realistically, what
>kind of expectations can we have about PDF technology?

It is not a noble goal.  Soon for the federal government it will be the law 
so Adobe better either figure it out or make the information available in a 
medium that is 100 percent accessible.  This idea that just trying and 
doing the noble thing for accessibility has to stop and ensuring 
accessibility from the beginning has to start.  Adobe never did that and 
now they are just prattling on and on about how they are working hard to 
help the disabled when it is they who created the barrier in the first place.

Realistically I don't expect much better than the nonsense output we 
currently get from Adobe.  They might do some slick parlor tricks and get 
the PDF conversion routines to interact better with screen readers 
automatically but the fundamental conversions will still be filled with 
text that's formatted so crazily that much of it is impossible to use.

Adobe says they'll be creating authoring tools to help address this problem 
by allowing people to indicate more about a document's structure.  If you 
think convincing the bulk of the internet community that adding alt-tags 
matters, well wait until you try and convince them to add structural 
information to their documents.

Received on Wednesday, 10 May 2000 12:34:04 UTC