- From: Steuerwalt, Jon C. <jon.c.steuerwalt@Maine.gov>
- Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 17:16:48 -0500
- To: "'Matthew Smith'" <matt@kbc.net.au>, w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Hello. I agree with Matthew's approach in general - to deploy two different formats - though my tool set for doing this is different. As someone said on this list some time ago, the important thing is to make the information accessible, not the PDF. PDF is great for what it was initially designed to do, but that was not to present information on the web. All the additional work required on the author's part to make a PDF document "web accessible" plus all the work required on the part of those users of screen readers who do utilize the correct technologies to then make that PDF document usable still won't make that PDF document accessible to all users. Why not make a [X]HTML version that's accessible for viewing on the web almost without exception no matter what technology is employed to access it AND post a version that can be easily converted to hardcopy instead? Here in Maine (USA) that's how we have decided to proceed with state government web sites. Jon -----Original Message----- From: Matthew Smith [mailto:matt@kbc.net.au] Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 4:42 PM To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org Subject: Re: PDFs and accessibility Hi Lisa/All > I am thinking of putting up either a simple HTML page or a text file as > an alternative to the PDF. Following a similar enquiry that I made not long ago, I have decided to go the dual-format route. For those who want good hard copy and for whom accessibility isn't an issue, I prepare a PDF version; in addition to this, I prepare an accessible, XHTML 1.0 compliant Web version. I still haven't finalised a solution to produce the two documents because, in many cases where I am required to do this, the original document was passed to me as Microsoft Word. I convert the Word to PDF by firstly changing to standard fonts (makes it easier for my software), then printing it to file as PostScript and then using the ps2pdf utility (part of GhostScript) to convert to PDF. The XHTML is a simple cut-and-paste into a text editor, where I add all the markup by hand. I use Amaya to check the XHTML for errors. This is a bit of a long-winded process - one thought is to get the source into Tex, which can convert to both PDF and HTML directly. The only problem is that very few of these older tools seem to generate decent markup. For your case, can you grab the source before it gets turned to PDF? I would imagine that it started off life as Word (or something) which then gets "printed" to PDF. Rather than try to make a second (PDF to HTML) conversion on the same data, I would try to back-track and convert from the original source. Converting to plain text from the original source would probably be the easiest answer, but using a markup language ([X]HTML) would probably make the document easier to understand if it is being read by a screen reader or talking browser. Hope this helps. Cheers M -- Matthew Smith IT Consultant - KBC, South Australia
Received on Thursday, 16 January 2003 17:19:40 UTC