Re: Removing PDFs and accessibility

Just making an attempt to move away from PDF as a system to view web
content is great move forward.  It recognizes the issue that PDF is a
poor online reading medium for many people with visual impairments.
Thank you Cosmic Muffin.

The primary application will be in the area of content meant for
reading.  When article is written in PDF it generally increases the
workload for reading on line, especially for a person with low vision.
 This generally involves a significant change in workload.  Since most
sighted people just print PDF articles, this introduces a major
inequality of work for people with full sight vs. people with partial
sight.

The ability to obtain high quality will be the trick.  The tag spaces
are not isomrphic, and tagged PDF enables meaningful text styling to
be embedded in blocks of untagged data.  As such I do not see a
programatically determined method of translation existing.  However a
good heuristic will probably suffice.

Thanks for the article, good luck Victoria.

Wayne Dick

On 3/25/12, David Woolley <forums@david-woolley.me.uk> wrote:
> David Woolley wrote:
>
>>
>> Incidentally, I have often sought out PDFs because they are not
>> fragmented into pages,
>
> The big problem I often find with lots of small hyperlinked pages, on
> sites (typically governmental, or software support) that should be
> information rich, is that one ends up going round circles, never
> actually getting to the detail you want.  I suspect that is often
> because that level of detail just does not exist, but unless one maps
> out the whole site and proves that you have seen all the pages, one can
> never be sure of that.
>
> A single, linearised, document makes it much easier for the reader to be
> sure that information is not present and makes it much harder for the
> author to avoid answering difficult questions by just hyperlinking you
> backwards and forwards.
>
>
>

Received on Sunday, 25 March 2012 18:54:14 UTC