Aussie Government Gives PDF the Thumbs Down 179
littlekorea writes "The central IT office of the Australian Government has advised its agencies to offer alternatives to Adobe's Portable Document Format to ensure folks with impaired vision are able to consume information on the Web. A Government-funded study found that PDFs can present themselves as image-only files to screen readers, rendering the information contained within them unreadable for the vision impaired."
Plain text? (Score:3, Interesting)
Other than plain text, are there really many other alternatives which don't endure levels of difficulty. Only other options I can see out there at the moment are ePub, simplified HTML or RTF - but of course then they all fall short of the possibly desired 'fancy formatting'.
As someone will likely also mention, why not just mandate that the PDF contents are actually text, as opposed to images (which is annoying to anyone!).
Throwing out the baby with the bath water (Score:3, Interesting)
That is the case with badly done PDFs where pages are rendered as images. PDFs done via the office plugin or Openoffice or any other proper authoring package at the default settings have the text present and the fonts embedded instead so should work fin as far as accessibility.
How about enforcing some computer literacy on document publishers instead?
What about Flash? Check out this site: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Also consider pdfs with complex page layouts. Deciphering the text flow from them is often hard for eyeballs, let alone computers.
2 columns is enough to throw out many screen readers.
Aussies IT Directors Retarded (Score:1, Interesting)
Remember the Sydney Olympic Games website being non-readable?
Did they learn anything? Nooooo.
And many .gov.au sites still depend on IE6 - they are frozen to a defunct standard, and applications standardized around 17' in LCD monitor resolution.
The Australian AG's office nearly mostly password protects and bitmaps all its corro to it clients
for the sole reason to make things harder. Brain dead.
This is forgetting all the very real and stark security holes associated PDF's and ADOBE.
Now some have gone a step further and sharepointed things.
The ANAO (Audit Office) should simply go around and give Dept's 'F' for disability considerations, and substandard policy setting.