Tuesday November 15, 2005

Jamal Mazrui on PDF Accessibility

The latest issue of the American Foundation for the Blind publication AccessWorld contains a nice look at PDF and PDF accessibility by Jamal Mazrui. It serves as a good tutorial on the issues of PDF accessbility. In addition to the wealth information in his article, there are a few UNIX/open-source things to note:

• Adobe Reader 7 for Linux & Solaris SPARC work with the Gnopernicus screen reader on those environments.
• Adobe Reader 7 (on Windows, Linux, Solaris) has a self-voicing option, so you can have the PDF read to you without using a screen reader if you want.
• Both StarOffice 8 & OpenOffice.org 2.0 can not only save files in PDF format, but will optionally save tagging information which as Jamal notes is important for accessibility. In fact, if you have a Microsoft Word document, the cheapest way to save it as an accessible, tagged PDF file is to use the free OpenOffice.org program to read the Word file (or Excel or Powerpoint file), and then export it as a tagged PDF file.

One key aspect of the StarOffice/OpenOffice.org tagging support is the fact that the PDF file format is a published standard that anyone can implement without any restrictions. And going the other way - the accessibility architecture in UNIX is likewise published and open, so that Adobe didn't have to buy anything, or pay anyone any money, in order to make Adobe Reader 7 support accessibility and the Gnopernicus screen reader in UNIX. And as noted elsewhere, this architecture is the subject of its own standards effort. (2005-11-15 12:39:43.0) Permalink Comments [2]