Agreed!
Tuesday, 29 September 2009
I agree that PDF accessibility is a subset of web accessibility, and it's important to address this aspect of any web site. I just wish more people would ask and answer these questions before presenting data in PDF format: WHY am I using this format? Can this data be presented more simply and elegantly in another way (like HTML, the 'lingua franca' of the web)? Would adding a print stylesheet be sufficient? And in those cases where PDF is indeed the best tool for the job, we need to use the best tool for making it accessible. At this point, Acrobat 8 or higher makes tagging easiest. It's the same old story.To a man whose favorite tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. So javascript aces want to do everything in javascript, Flash developers want to do everything in Flash. People who have learned the basics of conversion to PDF, and are satisfied with that, may never look into what it takes to go one step farther and make it an accessible PDF. This self-satisfied tendency, more than anything else, is what impedes accessibility on the web. That, and the failure of many otherwise imaginative people to grasp the many reasons for doing this correctly.
This is a comment on "Are PDFs More Important Than Web Accessibility?"