Re: PDF accessibility guidelines. WAS: Re: PDF's and Signatures

the simple basic fact is that a pdf is a "photo" or "image" of a document 
and no matter what is shown it is still treated or should be treated the 
same as any other image in a document.

Bob



On Mon, 26 Jan 2015, Duff Johnson wrote:

> Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 00:08:05 -0500
> From: Duff Johnson <duff@duff-johnson.com>
> To: WAI Interest Group <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
> Subject: Re: PDF accessibility guidelines. WAS: Re: PDF's and Signatures
> Resent-Date: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 05:08:36 +0000
> Resent-From: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> 
>> In my opinion, the greatest contributors to the persistence of PDF apart from Adobe’s ruthlessly effective strategizing & marketing
>
> Haha! If you knew Adobe as well as I do you would know how funny that is!
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> For over a decade PDF’s success has *nothing* to do with Adobe’s “strategizing and marketing” and *everything* to do with the simple, unadorned fact that PDF meets a wide variety of needs.
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>> The use cases for PDF on the web are very narrow and even the all-too-common and most spirited defences of its utility do not hold up to much scrutiny.
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> As the late Christopher Hitchens once said: "What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
>
>> Any content that originates in another format can just as readily be delivered using HTML and pixel perfect printing is similarly achievable using HTML, CSS, & JavaScript.
>
> Professionals in the industry (I know a few) appear to feel otherwise.
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>> I don’t believe that finding accommodations to manage the persistence & predominance of PDF on the web is the only or most effective approach – this has been going on for some time, now, with mixed results.
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> I don’t really know what you mean. It’s true that accessible PDF has been around for a while, albeit poorly supported by most. That can change.
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>> It seems to me that seeking alternatives & making the case for changing how things are done will be ultimately more effective in making the web more accessible rather than applying endless Band-Aids to a limping technology.
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> Or, developers simply make the necessary (and relatively modest) effort to support tagged PDF - which is not (unlike HTML/CSS) a moving target, and it’s “job done”.
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> Why insist that people should not have what they so clearly want? Why not rather insist that developers support the longstanding accessibility features in said internationally-standardized technology?
>
>> Congratulations to IBM …  to paraphrase Kant: enlightenment is freedom from nonage.
>
> We’ll see. I’m all for using technologies such as EPUB where appropriate. I have yet to see EPUB files gain a significant toehold on the web.
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> Duff.
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