Re: GNOME Newsletter...writing and editing

[Sander Vesik <sander_traveling yahoo co uk>]

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.

If the newsletter is marked up as say DocBook XML (not entirely 
unreasonable choice) then getting both pdf and html versions of it would 
not be a major hurdle.

> -Bill



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