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.

Definitely true. That said we are observing a trend towards automatically tagging all PDF at the point of creation. This is what Apple now does with their productivity suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) and it increasingly seems like a reasonable ask of all vendors. Just because it’s possible to make a lousy PDF isn’t an excuse to do so.

>    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.

As I understand it VIP PDF is targeting users / cases where simplified presentation is desirable. Other vendors (e.g. ZoomText) prefer to integrate Tagged PDF awareness into a “classical” view of PDF, e.g., call-outs, highlighting, zoom magnification, etc… driven by tagged PDF.

> 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.  

Certainly, it’s an alternative view of the page. It’s similar to the way in which HTML + ARIA without CSS can be said to be missing a lot of clues… but that’s the sort of “view” of a webpage that a screen-reader provides.

Duff.

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