Re: Final Draft New 508 Rules, and fail cases for 1.3

Hi Wayne,

I support your efforts here. Below is some information you may find useful.

> If the PDF standards contradict these fail cases then these rules should override the PDF standard. 

There’s nothing in PDF/UA (the ISO standard for accessible PDF) that contradicts your fail cases. The PDF solution to the problems you mention is to repurpose the document in order to present the content as reflowable (and resizable, and re-configurable) text with appropriate semantics (headings, lists, tables, etc).

Here’s how the goals you identified are addressed by PDF/UA...

> (1) Content must make sense and can be read an used when the authors visual presentation is removed.


This is fundamentally a design requirement, not really covered by PDF/UA (but certainly not excluded).

> (2) Content is linear and in proper reading order when the author's visual presentation is removed.


Guaranteed by conformance with PDF/UA.

> (3) The author's visual presentation can be replaced by a visual presentation format that matches the visual requirements of the reader. Specifically, the reader of content can have the color (back and fore), font-family, font-size, letter spacing, line spacing and line length needed to support effective visual reading.

Content repurposed from a PDF document that conforms to PDF/UA will be able to meet this requirement. 

> No reader should be subjected to horizontal scrolling when reading at any font size so long as the line length fits at least one word per line on a view port.

Those who must zoom to read know very well that most PDF pages fail this requirement all the time. As I mentioned above, the contents of a PDF that conforms to PDF/UA may be reliably reflowed to suit any specific device, viewer software or assistive technology.

Duff.

Received on Monday, 25 May 2015 21:44:34 UTC