1 OpenOffice

Just to note: OpenOffice isn’t a PDF reader, it is however (since 1.1) a PDF writer on Linux/Unix, OS X and Windows. A good PDF reader for Linux would be Evince

posted at 07:22 am on August 23, 2005 by Nick Richards

2 Awesome article

Joe, that’s an excellent piece of work – thanks!

The main reason we are using PDFs is because “they are cheaper to create than HTML versions”. And yet, they are not tagged, nor tested for accessibility. Even worse – some of the PDFs are really just massive pictures of text.

At least you’ve given me some hope of resolving the “PDF crisis” we have here. Step 1, tackle PDFs that shouldn’t be PDFs. Step 2, make sure the hand-authored PDFs are tagged. Step 3, see if we can’t replace FOP with PDFLib. The FOP documentation clearly states it does not generate tagged PDFs. Otherwise, start talking with the FOP guys and see if we cant start work there.

posted at 07:59 am on August 23, 2005 by Mike Davies

3 Common Look and Feel

A few clarifications regarding PDFs and the Canadian Common Look and Feel standards:

First off, a minor point: the correct URL for the CLF (Common Look and Feel) reference is www.tbs–sct.gc.ca/clf–nsi/inter/inter–01–02_e.asp

Also, it should be clearly stated that the CLF specification is now almost 6 years old. In 1999, when the Government of Canada was drafting their specifications for Federal web “publishers”, the then current practice was to “print” text articles, spreadsheets, etc. as PDF (one button publishing) and then post these files to the web. (There was also a tendency to convert PowerPoint presentations to “web presentationsâ€? and then dump them upon an unsuspecting and helpless public). Thus when the specifications were being written, better to err in favor of the non-mainstream then to continue to foster this type of detritus on the masses – in 1999 PDF was “not directly accessible to persons with (primarily) visual impairmentsâ€?.

It is true, and you have illustrated with depth and research, that today PDFs can be made more accessible if they are done properly. However, as your article points out, much care and “hand finessing� is required today to ensure that these documents are accessible. Will these obstacles be over-come? Sure, some day, but as your article also points out, more often than not the final output can, and should be, presented in a format other than PDF – and I truly hope that the readers of your article remember that more than anything else.

Next, you neatly side-step the very real issue of PDF’s incompatibility with the current Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which state clearly: Priority 2: 11.1 “Use W3C technologies when they are available and appropriate for a task and use the latest versions when supported.� For many developers working within the confines of these “Guidelines� (that have become, sadly, pseudo-standards – even though they were never written to be such), PDF is not a W3C technology. Is it “open� – yes, but is it W3C sanctioned? No. But time changes everything…

Finally, however, a thank-you. Well written, well researched, and relatively opinion neutral – exactly the kind of dialogue needed today.

posted at 09:12 am on August 23, 2005 by John Foliot

4 What You Don't Know...

Absolutley stellar article!

I work for a state government agency where I’m just a minor web coding droid, but I try my best to make my code accessable as much as I possibly can.

Accessability is touted as an important issue here but usually is just paid lip-service in practice mostly because, in my opinion, no one really understands the issue or the limits of the technology – particularly when it comes to PDF documents. I’ve been adding as much header info to all my PDF’s as I possibly could for the last few years in spite of the hassle I get from our IT folks that it’s unecessary or a waste of time. I don’t think they’ll be saying that when we change over to a content management system later, but what do I know.

I was just recently given permission to use Acrobat 7.0 and noticed several new and useful features, but I was unaware of the tagging tools! I’m going to be spending whatever free time I have to studying this feature and I’m going to bookmark, print, read and forward this article to as many folks as I can!

What a great article to launch this *incredible* redesign of A List Apart!

Thanks!

posted at 11:31 am on August 23, 2005 by David Mohrman

6 Much thanks

Thanks you for a fair and smooth running document. I believe it deserves more than one reading.

By the way, I can’t tell you if I like the new design better than the old design. To me, the audience, they both worked. I never felt lost, or bored, or impatient, when searching for something … or just cruising. I guess there are less choices and more whitespace. I like that.

Have a nice day. Guess I better pull out my FrameMaker 7 manual ….

The audience thanks you.

posted at 01:54 pm on August 23, 2005 by Brian Kim

7 Print Article

I’d love to print this article for further reading later. Any chance you could create a print-friendly link to the article?

posted at 04:47 pm on August 23, 2005 by Brad Spitzer

8 Untitled

First off, thanks for a wonderful article. My comments are both pro-PDF and con-PDF.

Re PDF is overused:

May I nominate:

15. Word documents with tables that people have dragged around to look nice. They maintain the proper number of columns when converted to PDF, but become unusable hash with extra and mismatched columns when converted to HTML.

We used to spend hours trying to fix these. Now I’m a team of one instead of a team of three, and I couldn’t survive if I had to fix these documents.

16. Documents that are so huge that when saved as Word HTML our other authoring tools can’t clean them up.

Re We’re not just talking about blind people:

And of course, there are low-vision folks who need Reader’s zoom feature (which is, nevertheless, clunky for viewing wide tables).

Re Content vs. user agent:

There is the issue that if the PDF opens in the browser window, the browser’s Back button no longer has the expected effect when a user mistakenly uses it partway through a PDF document and suddenly finds themselves out of the document instead of elsewhere in the document. This is similar to the AJAX problem.

Re Authoring tools:

One is not even home free with the tagging tools provided for Office 2000+. People need to be trained to produce clean source documents in the first place. I’ve run into the following problems, which apply both to saving as HTML and to converting to PDF:

1. Office is set by default (changeable under Tools > AutoCorrect) to assign styles based on your formatting. This sometimes results in a table cell in the middle of a table being marked as <h1> or some such. Ideally, your IT department would disable this option as part of their installation procedure.

2. Excel spreadsheets pasted into Word documents may be output as an image. The only way to ensure they stay as a table is to select the desired cells and paste into Word using Ctrl-V, not Paste Special. The downside of this is that sometimes the layout of the table will get messed up, but it will be semantically sound. (And let’s not forget folks who spread their column headings across three spreadsheet rows instead of using Wrap, or who put the title of the spreadsheet in the first row instead of in Page setup.)

3. Some folks align tabular data using tabs instead of Word tables. This produces inaccessible data non-tables. Word’s Text to table can sometimes fix this, but there is often pre-and-post cleanup involved.

4. Some folks align data in tables by adding extra table columns instead of pressing Ctrl-Tab to indent. This produces hard-to-navigate tables, requiring tedious manual cleanup effort.

5. As mentioned above, people drag table columns around, sometimes producing extra columns (problem for HTML only, not for PDF, so far as I know).

6. Some people put the title of the table inside the table, making in the first row of the table. Word’s Split Table, followed by Table to text on the title only, can cure these.

Hope this helps.

posted at 07:08 pm on August 23, 2005 by Charles Belov

9 Slightly off-thread

——
The goal of the accessibility advocate is to improve
accessibility for people with disabilities, period.
——

Sorry for rehashing an old thread over at accessify, but I’m with Tommy on this one ( http://www.autisticcuckoo.net/archive.php?id=2005/08/24/joe-clark-on-accessibility )

posted at 06:38 am on August 24, 2005 by Richard Conyard

10 Print Style Sheet?

ahem…love the look and feel of the site — but has anyone tried actually PRINTING anything? I get three pages of 6pt font and then a bunch of (mostly) blank pages.

ALA seems to be slipping in its old age… :)

posted at 09:12 am on August 24, 2005 by Michael Thompson

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