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PDFs and Accessibility

Thursday, 10 September 2009

On Fri, 4 Sep 2009, Mark Magennis wrote: "We did an audit recently of a website where up to 99% of the information was contained in inaccessible PDFs. Crikey! It raised some interesting questions about what to say to the client about it. You can read my ramblings about this on the CFIT website [1]. Please comment if you have any interesting input or opinions. I think this is a big issue in web accessibility. " Well, of course I can never resist responding to the PDF issue. My core reaction: while we are not there yet, I would say that authoring technologies for "single source master" design of "documents" are now maturing; and publishers are gradually becoming more clued into the importance of such tools, of which accessibility is only one. So while I don't disagree with anything in the CFIT article, I would like to emphasise the idea of offering users multiple alternative formats to choose from for this particular category of content. Yes, PDF (preferably properly tagged); but yes, HTML (properly tagged); and, soon, DAISY and ePub (ditto). If that kind of infrastructure is put into place on the authoring/publication chain side, then we can actually escape the most difficult questions that Mark raises. It then doesn't actually matter whether "enough users have good enough assistive technologies to work with" any particular one of the technologies (PDF or otherwise) - because they each get to choose whichever works best for them. Is this complete utopianism? I honestly don't think so. Yes, there are edge cases, where something is harder to achieve in one of these technologies than the others (which was the basis for Joe Clark's somewhat strained defence of PDF). But (as I have said before, too many times) the vast majority of the content currently published in PDF just is not in that category - it is all very well covered by a wide diversity of technologies at various levels of maturity. We don't have to shoehorn all users into just one of these. So what to advise the client? That this is key strategic issue for their business; and that accessibility is only the tip of this iceberg. They need to take a strategic, long term, look at their publications processes, one that is not focussed on a particular output format, and especially not a single, fundamentally visually oriented format (as PDF still is). If they can think about re-engineering that process into one that can produce a living repository of structured, re-purposable, information, which will benefit the organisation and its users long beyond any single, transient technology-de-jour - rather than one whose business has changed merely from putting dots of ink on paper to one of projecting pictures of dots of ink on paper onto a computer screen - then, which is more, "you will be a man, my son..." (But if that is just too wishy washy and abstract ... whisper "kindle" and "reflowable" and see if that can't work better...) Good luck! - Barry.