RE: Reflow persona "What's New WCAG 2.1"

VIP’s reliance on tags means that is limited in situations where documents are not tagged.   It also essentially means that it is creating a new view from the tagged content and you lose the other visual aspects on the page – so when tags are available and you are only reading content it’s good – although you lose some visual aspects such as headers & footers, lines, colors and other visual artifacts that may be helpful clues.  Also you lose any visual styles that may have been used that may not be marked up.  Most of the documents I encounter are not fully tagged or tagged with structures who semantics can be differentiated in VIP and thus it feels like I am seeing an alternative view of the document and wonder if there might be something I am missing.

Jonathan

From: Duff Johnson <duff@duff-johnson.com>
Sent: Friday, September 18, 2020 10:05 AM
To: Steve Green <steve.green@testpartners.co.uk>
Cc: Gijs Veyfeyken <gijs@five-oaks.be>; Gregg Vanderheiden RTF <gregg@raisingthefloor.org>; Dick <wayneedick@gmail.com>; W3C WAI Interest Group <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Re: Reflow persona "What's New WCAG 2.1"

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VIP PDF is doing the same as Adobe Reader’s Reflow mode, but with a few important differences.

Not so….

  *   Adobe’s “reflow mode” does not use Tagged PDF except in the most minor of ways (within list structures, or so I’ve been told).
  *   VIP PDF uses Tagged PDF.
Accordingly the applications cannot really be compared. The former uses content order, which is fundamentally arbitrary, the latter uses proper logical ordering and semantics.

The consequence is that PDFs are much more readable in VIP PDF than in Adobe Reader’s Reflow mode.

Yes!

Duff Johnson
Project Leader, ISO 14289 (PDF/UA)
CEO, PDF Association