Print PDF -vs- Accessible PDF
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
There are two purposes for PDF and unfortunately they conflict. A viewer application so people can view/print typical documents without owning that application (Accessibility in mind). The other is inexpensive reproduction of print materials (various paper sizes) often beyond the scale of accessibility such as CAD, blue prints, multi-column layouts, complicated tables/graphics (often beyond today's accessibility capability). Side note: The simple scanning of pages as images (as many major copiers do, text included) complicates & hinders such efforts as well. Separating these two product purposes hasn't not been a priority. History shows you can not satisfy both camps with a single product.
This is a comment on "Research Proposal: Accessibility Support for Non-HTML Web Technologies"