- From: Olaf Drümmer <olaflist@callassoftware.com>
- Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2012 00:36:44 +0100
- To: W3C WAI ig <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
- Cc: Olaf Drümmer <olaflist@callassoftware.com>
Hi Ramón, On 14 Dec 2012, at 10:06, Ramón Corominas wrote: > Could you please provide the name of a Mac or Linux user agent that supports the accessibility features of PDF? If not, the only environment where PDF is accessibility supported is Windows (yes, not only JAWS). please have a look at "callas pdfGoHTML" which runs as a plug-in in Adobe Acrobat (versins 9, X or XI), and turns tagged PDF into HTML, and right away opening the HTML in the user's default browser. callas pdfGoHTML runs on Mac and Windows and is free of charge. It can be downloaded from http://www.callassoftware.com/callas/doku.php/en:products:pdfgohtml We at callas do understand that requiring Adobe Acrobat (the payable version of the Acrobat viewer) is a problem for some users. We are currently working on a way to either make callas pdfGoHTML work with the free Adobe Reader on both Mac and Windows, or if that fails, to provide a free of charge standalone tool with just the tagged PDF to HTML functionality. By end of Q1 2013 one or the other should become available. I am not sure that people who find PDF useful should be blamed for Apple's decision to base the presentation functionality of the Mac OS X operating system on PDF, but not to provide accessibility in a similar way as they do for other areas of the operating system and the tools running on it. It has been proven that PDF can be made accessible as well as HTML (which has been documented in the form of the ISO standard ISO 14289-1 - aka PDF/UA - just recently in July 2012), and it is up to developers on the various platforms to support it well. BTW - ironically Microsoft does so much more for accessible PDF than Apple or Google or... ever did so far. Admittedly I do not know of a comparable options for Linux. Olaf CEO of callas software
Received on Friday, 14 December 2012 23:37:43 UTC