Re: PDF Alternatives?

It may be worth checking out www.futureforms.com for some interesting demos 
& software. This is a proprietary solution that claims to bridge the 
paper/electronic form divide (using Activex controls & XML output). They 
seem to be making progress (compared to my earlier visits to the site), 
although I have no idea how well the software would work in a real-world 
situation.

They have demo forms optimized for JFW, WindowEyes, MS speech, & their own 
Verbal-Eyes plugin. I did a quick test of the JFW version, & I was able to 
navigate through the fields pretty successfully. The only snag was that I 
didn't get any feedback on what I was entering in the fields (no speech or 
Braille echoing).

As for PDF text conversion itself, it works independently of screen 
readers, so should be equally good/bad for them all. However, there was 
some noise a few months back about JAWS support for navigation within PDF 
docs (similar to the Virtual Cursor used to navigate Internet Explorer). 
However, again, when I last checked the feature list for the new Jaws 3.7 
there was no mention of PDF.

Patrick

At 10:48 AM 8/2/00, Steven McCaffrey wrote:
>        The bottom line for all accessibility issues is test the resulting 
> page.  If n-1 documents converted well, the n-th one may not.
>The conversion tools are better now, but still the pages need to be tested 
>after conversion.
>Do other screen readers work with
>  Acrobat 4.05 and do as well as Jaws?

Received on Thursday, 3 August 2000 18:41:40 UTC