RE: Accessible PDF Repair

The accessibility of the user interface in Adobe Acrobat has varied over the years, not always for the better. When we started repairing PDFs in 2006 we were using Acrobat 7, and the keyboard accessibility was good for most purposes. We programmed a keystroke recorder with long strings of keystrokes so that we could perform certain tasks such as creating tables or lists incredibly easily.

Then Acrobat 8 was launched. Not only did virtually all our recorded strings no longer work, but some functions were no longer possible at all using keyboard navigation. I have not done this sort of work since then so I don't know how accessible later versions are.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd

-----Original Message-----
From: deborah.kaplan@suberic.net [mailto:deborah.kaplan@suberic.net] 
Sent: 01 March 2013 20:09
To: Elizabeth J. Pyatt
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Subject: Re: Accessible PDF Repair

On Fri, 1 Mar 2013, Elizabeth J. Pyatt wrote:

> I would add that there's a paradox that someone trying to repair a document for a screen reader within a screen reader environment. Unless a document is already screen reader accessible, I am not sure how well it can be repaired within a screen reader. That may my limited imagination though.

There are other ways in which the remediation is not accessible, however. I am a voice/keyboard user, and I try and try to remediate our documents, but it's just all but impossible. So even though I can see what the tags should be, I can't create them.

-Deborah Kaplan
Accessibility Team Co-Lead, Dreamwidth Studios LLC Digital Resources Archivist, Tufts University

Received on Friday, 1 March 2013 20:20:41 UTC