RE: Site Maps and Screen Readers

Dear All,
This was a post on a recent I-Design forum that might provide some help
to those developing for pdf accessiblity. I have not tried it myself and
I am not a programmer, so please don't take my word for it. If anyone
else can add to this I think that it would be of great help to many
people.

Kind regards

Sime

The Acrobat on line tool that converts pages from PDF to HTML is a
perl program. The better way for current documents would be to have
this program installed on your server, and then simply code CGI
links that would automatically do the conversion on the fly as
needed. That is, for each document, you would have clearly marked
link to the PDF version, and another link that would be to the CGI
program that ran the converter. If it works on the Acrobat server,
it should work on yours.

Unfortunately, Acrobat doesn't seem to offer web designers this
utility for their own server, so I guess you will have to use
Acrobat's server instead.

Here is how you code your links:
<a href="HTML/Accessible version of (Document Name).You can try this
to see how it works with the link below - I've simply selected a
random tax form to convert from the fedworld.gov site

<http://access.adobe.com/perl/convertPDF.pl?url=http://ftp.fedworld.gov/
pub/irs-pdf/i1040sc.pdf>

So basically, instead of having to convert 350 documents, by simply
coding a link to the Acrobat site you will provide on-the-fly
conversion to anyone who wants it. This has the advantage in that
you don't need to do repeat conversions when documents change, and
of course it will be a lot easier for you to code 350 links than run
that many conversions. Especially since all you have to do is cut
and paste the string"
EUDORA="AUTOURL"http://access.adobe.com/perl/convertPDF.pl?url=[full
path to document]>HTML/Accessible version of (Document Name).</a>

You can try this to see how it works with the link below - I've
simply selected a random tax form to convert from the fedworld.gov
site
<http://access.adobe.com/perl/convertPDF.pl?url=http://ftp.fedworld.
gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040sc.pdf>

So basically, instead of having to convert 350 documents, by simply
coding a link to the Acrobat site you will provide on-the-fly
conversion to anyone who wants it. This has the advantage in that
you don't need to do repeat conversions when documents change, and
of course it will be a lot easier for you to code 350 links than run
that many conversions. Especially since all you have to do is cut
and paste the string
<http://access.adobe.com/perl/convertPDF.pl?url=> and put it in
front of the existing URL.

Acrobat also offers a free, downloadable accessible reader, Acrobat
5.0 with Search and Accessibility.
<http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/alternate.html#50enu>

It's a 10-meg. download so it is not something that users will
particularly want to do, but in the long run those who need it are
going to get it. You can at least offer the link to the reader on
your site.



-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-ig-request@w3.org]On
Behalf Of Charles McCathieNevile
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2001 15:20
To: David Woolley
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Site Maps and Screen Readers


Acrobat Reader is a browser, although it browses PDF documents, and only
version 5 (I think) has connectivity for screen readers. But running
documents through html2ps and opening them in PDF is (admittedly a
resource-intensive) possibility for getting this functionality in your
existing system.

Cheers

Charles

On Thu, 9 Aug 2001, David Woolley wrote:

  > A JAWS user I speak to says he is unware of any
  > functionality that allows him to navigate via
  > headings.

  Why should this be limited to screen readers?  Amaya is the only
  browser that I know of that recovers the heading tree (which is not
  a subset of the document tree).  html2ps (as used to prepare the
  PDF version of the HTML and CSS2 specs) also does, but isn't a
  browser.


-- 
Charles McCathieNevile    http://www.w3.org/People/Charles  phone: +61
409 134 136
W3C Web Accessibility Initiative     http://www.w3.org/WAI    fax: +1
617 258 5999
Location: 21 Mitchell street FOOTSCRAY Vic 3011, Australia
(or W3C INRIA, Route des Lucioles, BP 93, 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex,
France)

Received on Thursday, 9 August 2001 10:45:14 UTC