Re: GNOME Newsletter...writing and editing

[Bill Haneman <bill haneman sun com>]

Hello folks:

If you only have time to read one of the links I posted, please read the
AFB whitepaper; it's short and to the point.

Fixing this problem (or at least, attaining parity with Windows when it
comes to PDF accessibility) is high on the accessibility wish list.

To do it, we'd need both ends of the chain; since the Adobe tools for
non-Windows don't include accessible-content support, nor does the Adobe
non-Windows readers... we need content creation support.  Perhaps pdflib
can be extended to write the necessary accessibility tags (basically
redundant text info accompanying the content), providing the PDF 1.4
spec is freely implementable as were the old versions.  Then we'd need
to make xpdf or whatever pdf reading libs we use (pdflib again?) would
need to be extended to read this same information back, and they'd need
to expose the information in their UI via AtkText.  I suppose a simple
component that extracted the plaintext and put it into a terminal, text
editor, or GtkTextView would work fine as well.

This would make a great project for somebody.... :-)

best regards,

Bill

On Thu, 2003-03-06 at 15:07, Bill Haneman wrote:
> 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>