Friday August 05, 2005

Accessible PDF documents on Solaris!

I'm starting to feel a bit like fellow Sun blogger MaryMary - in my case unabashedly tooting the accessibility horn lately. But when you get a lot of good news, it can be hard to resist talking about it. On a lark last night I went over to the Adobe web site, and discovered that Adobe Reader 7 is now available for download for Solaris SPARC.

I've been playing with versions of Adobe Reader 7 for Linux for a while now (it works nicely with the Gnopernicus screen reader/magnifier on Linux - in Braille and speech and everything), and have been looking forward to Adobe releasing this for Solaris. Last night I downloaded it onto my Solaris 10 SPARC box, fired up Gnopernicus, loaded my PDF test pages, and found it worked like a charm! When I used the arrow keys to move tthrough the text, Gnopernicus spoke the letters and lines to me. Ctrl-arrowing through the text and the words were read aloud. Magnification smoothly tracked the caret movement. And all of the text appeared faithfully on my refreshible Braille display. Then I went over to a sample form, and had no trouble filling it out using the screen reader. How delightful! A company releases a major piece of software, and it is immediately accessible, out of the box - just as it should be! And hopefully we'll see an Adobe Reader 7 release for Solaris x86 soon... (2005-08-05 10:08:12.0) Permalink Comments [3]