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PDFs and Accessibility

Thursday, 10 September 2009

On Wed, 9 Sep 2009, Donal J. Rice wrote: > > One of the progressive managers I know recently told me they > > then pay the desk-top publishing house to 'tag-up' this PDF in > > order for it to be accessible. I think this is a good incremental step: but clients can and should be advised to formulate this brief for the outside agency more precisely and explicitly. In particular they should be explicit that the delivered PDF must be not merely "tagged", but "accessible". I suggest that be expressed as "conforming to WCAG 2.0 level AA". Beyond that, it would be ideal if they start moving now to adopting some form of "accessible master format" as a "primary" deliverable at least from such outsourced work (migrating it to internal document authoring processes would, of course, be a longer term process). The issues there are much bigger than just accessibility; and the available tools are still immature. But if this sort of requirement starts being built into procurement then that would send a clear market signal that will actually positively affect the availability of tools. There is a whole other debate about what is an appropriate choice of "accessible master format". Insofar as we are talking about public sector agencies and public sector procurement I think this is a matter of major public interest: it would be very useful if it could be taken up in a co-ordinated way. But ... I've just spent 15 minutes trying, fruitlessly, to figure out, yet again, who, if anybody, is currently responsible for "IT strategy" in central government. But I did enjoy this page (albeit in a very grim, Irish, "black humour", "In Bruges" sort of way): which kind of says it all...