Re: GNOME Newsletter...writing and editing

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

On Thu, 2003-03-06 at 14:53, James Henstridge wrote:

> PDF can be accessible.  The newer versions of the PDF standard allow a 
> document to embed information about the actual text, which is used by 
> the accessibility code in Adobe's PDF reader and also to allow 
> reformatting documents for smaller screens.

One hears a lot about PDF accessibility... but it's easy to miss some
key issues...

Unfortunately there are no PDF viewers that can expose this information,
except on Windows.  Likewise, the PDF generating tools we have on Linux
(like pdflib, etc.) are not currently capable of putting that
information into the content.  THomas Merz has written some good
articles on the problem; suffice it to say that PDF accessibility is a
serious problem for us non-windows folks at this time.  Basically it
seems that either Windows apps or Acrobat are the only PDF content
generators that can provide accessibility tagging at this time:
http://www.planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/pdf2k/01E/tmerz_taggedpdf.pdf

Also, this information is not actually access to the PDF content, it
amounts to duplicating all of the PDF content with text-only tags!

The American Foundation for the Blind has published a whitepaper on the
issues; it draws attention to the lack of support outside of a couple of
proprietary products and the fact that it's currently tied to the
Windows world: 
http://www.afb.org/info_document_view.asp?documentid=1706

Note that I am not arguing for "no PDF", I am asserting the need for an
additional format if we want our newsletter to be accessible.  I think
that an inaccessible GNOME-2 newsletter would 'send the wrong signal' to
some folks who are closely watching our accessibility work.

-Bill

p.s. - for your browsing pleasure; even in the windows world pdf
accessibility is not great:
http://www.newcastle.edu.au/policy/web/access/office/pdf.html
http://www.mcu.org.uk/articles/pdfs.html
http://trace.wisc.edu:8080/mailarchive/techwatch/msg00167.shtml
http://www.policybrief.org/access.asp

> 
> If you want something that will print nicely on paper, PDF is a much 
> better choice than HTML.
> 
> James.
-- 
Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>