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."
southern hemisphere note! (Score:4, Funny)
A thumbs down in the southern hemisphere is the same as a thumbs up in the northern hemisphere, as long as you name the file bruce.pdf. It saves confusion.
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as long as you name the file bruce.pdf. It saves confusion
This one? [paperinside.com]
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!).
So the problem is fancy formatting. (Score:5, Insightful)
And the rest of us say "Get rid of it". We do not access government documents to be blown away by their totally rad page style. We access them for information, and extracting the information from the glumph that encases it is sometimes hard for the best of us.
html all the way. Any formatting you cannot fit in a simple stylsheet can get left out.
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Congratulations, you have jut declared that you do not wish to be able to download forms over the internet.
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Congratulations, you have jut declared that you do not wish to be able to download forms over the internet.
Woah woah! When did it become impossible to print HTML documents???
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Instead of just stating this, you should be asking, "Why?" Because there is no good reason for it. If you need to reference a particular section, use section numbers. If you need to reference a particular sentence, then you could even number the sentences if you truly believe they are uncountable otherwise. Likewise the illustrations, tables, etc. You see, as it turns out, there is no good reason for rigid do
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The insurance industry is not alone in this regard. In the legal sector, specific page and font formatting is required for many court documents as well as correspondence. You need it to appear as intended, not changed based on the reader's capabilities.
There are m
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Most contracts and many forms require rendering with specific type sizes, specific layouts etc.
Instead of just stating this, you should be asking, "Why?" Because there is no good reason for it.
Once you understand that there's no reason to ever have anyone fill out a form for anything ever but greed then questions like this become a big wankoff jerkfest of mental masturbation. The simple truth is that this kind of requirement exists, and software like Adobe Acrobat and formats like PDF have cropped up to fill it. If you want to go live in a dumpster someplace and let someone else meet project requirements, that's cool.
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Why should a form have fancy formatting?
For machine scanning, of course. Ideally we'd do away with them and move to digital signatures, but there continue to be issues to work out.
If you're accessing it over the internet, why do you need a form at all?
Because governments resist change until they can figure out how to make it work for them.
And you can download a web page, you know.
Let's not be overly obtuse here. PDF exists for a reason, and that reason is to permit the precise position of each element in a way that is not possible even with CSS.
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That's not a reason. That's a mistake.
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PDF exists for a reason, and that reason is to permit the precise position of each element in a way that is not possible even with CSS.
That's not a reason. That's a mistake.
I'd ask you to explain what the hell you're talking about, but I suspect I'm going to learn that you're batshit crazy no matter what the answer is.
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Why should a form have fancy formatting?
I already feel like hanging myself when I do my taxes. I shouldn't feel like gouging my eyes out too.
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Again, wrong problem, wrong solution. Proper solution: fairtax. No tax forms. No filling out tax forms. No more regressive abuse of the low income folks. And no PDFs.
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That's outside the scope of the problem.
We're not living in fantasyland. We can't snap our fingers and make everything fair and efficient. For the forseeable future, we have forms. As long as we have forms, they should be easy on the eyes.
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The problem with "faitax" is it's not fair. Those who recieve more benefits from government (the rich) should pay a higher percentage of taxes than those who recieve nothing at all from government (those barely above poverty).
I do agree that the tax system is fucked. The Capital Gains Tax should be repealed, and the people "earning" their living gambling on the stock market shouldn't be paying lower taxes than someone earning the same amount of money in a construction business.
There shouldn't be loopholes a
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I don't know, without all the formatting my tax forms would be more legible.
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?
Re:Throwing out the baby with the bath water (Score:5, Informative)
Not necessarily. PDF does not preserve text flow. It breaks up paragraphs into lines (or less if kerning has been altered), and places them accurately on the page. If you have a multi-column layout, then a pdf-to-text algorithm (first step in screen reading) is likely to put column-2-line-1 between column-1-lines-{1 and 2}. Best of luck sorting that out.
Re:Throwing out the baby with the bath water (Score:4, Informative)
Not necessarily. PDF does not preserve text flow. It breaks up paragraphs into lines (or less if kerning has been altered), and places them accurately on the page.
This is not true. PDF is capable of preserving text flow if the document contains such information. See this as an example [hoboes.com]: if you open it in acrobat reader and move the text cursor using the down arrow, you'll see it travel correctly among columns and paragraphs.
No page description format will help if the page has been generated in a broken way: for instance, try extracting text from the tables of an html page generated by javascript.
If you have a multi-column layout, then a pdf-to-text algorithm (first step in screen reading) is likely to put column-2-line-1 between column-1-lines-{1 and 2}. Best of luck sorting that out.
In this case it is the pdf-to-text algorithm to be broken, and should be fixed.
Re:Throwing out the baby with the bath water (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not true. PDF is capable of preserving text flow if the document contains such information.
Yes, this can be done, but it is almost universally not done. Of all the pdfs out there, almost all of them that have anything but single column text flow incorrectly. The answer is of course to include this information every time, but I don't see how you can mandate that if the standard doesn't include it and most or all current software creates pdfs that don't have it.
If you have a multi-column layout, then a pdf-to-text algorithm (first step in screen reading) is likely to put column-2-line-1 between column-1-lines-{1 and 2}. Best of luck sorting that out.
In this case it is the pdf-to-text algorithm to be broken, and should be fixed.
I'm not sure that you can always figure out the text flow correctly a posteriori. Once the correct text flow information hasn't been encoded in the document, it's a bit of a crap shoot in some cases to figure out what was intended. Where should that floating box go? Many pdfs have text flow broken up so badly that they appear to read randomly. A few bits from one sentence, then a few words or parts from the middle of another paragraph. Literally the best option for some pdfs is to export them as images and import those to an ocr program.
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Security (Score:2)
Possiblly not a bad thing given the vast amount of security flaws and exploits that PDF has been hit with, especially over the last few years.
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PDF has its merits (Score:2)
I really like PDF's ability to retain the font and display of the document without worrying about fonts and the application.
Since I have to distribute documents that are read on a variety of systems, including Linux, OSX, iPhone/Pad and Windows, PDF really beats all other alternatives in compatibility.
Adobe should really work on creating a text/image-only version of PDF without their fancy password protecting features and what-not.
If they don't, perhaps an open source group can take on the challenge.
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What about Flash? Check out this site: (Score:5, Interesting)
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No navigation buttons? It's worst than that. Without plug-ins, all you get is a gradient in the background of an otherwise empty page.
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What format (Score:2, Insightful)
Missing from the statement is what the preferred format is.
I would expect a Microsoft format from our illustrious leaders.
Reads like a fairly dumb statement which is what I always
expect from our government.
Sounds like a lead up to them locking themselves (us) into
using a proprietary, expensive, unusable system.
Who , me , negative ,
yep
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Of course a Word document is better suited. So is anything else that preserves the text itself, as opposed to preserving its rendered form. HTML is pretty good for this too. With PDF it can be hard to even figure out where the next word in a sentence is. It doesn't have anything to do with proprietary or not, there are enough free or open formats that work, it's just that PDF is not one of them.
Re:What format (Score:4, Insightful)
I would expect a Microsoft format from our illustrious leaders.
Bingo. Anyone who doesn't see Microsoft's hand in this is hopelessly naive.
WTF? (Score:4, Funny)
What does it matter that they can't read the text? PDFs aren't about content, they are about preserving the layout. At least that is what it seems like to me when I am foolish enough to try and read PDFs on a device with a different number of pixels than the person who made the PDF file.
If the content matters at all, someone should invent a technology that allows text to be tagged somehow with indicators of the MEANING of that portion of text, like 'this is a title', and let the display device render the text according to how the reader can best view it. It sounds crazy, and it may take a few decades to do, but think of the benefits.
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If the content matters at all, someone should invent a technology that allows text to be tagged somehow with indicators of the MEANING of that portion of text, like 'this is a title', and let the display device render the text according to how the reader can best view it. It sounds crazy, and it may take a few decades to do, but think of the benefits.
Yes, everyone, this is possibly the richest seam of sarcasm ever discovered on /.
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Rich my ass, it's a mediocre jab with an unclear target followed by a solution the target is almost certainly considering.
Is he making fun of Adobe? Or Australia? If it's Adobe, the initial jab is not sarcasm, it's simply accurate. If the target is the Aussie govt., it's not effectively making fun of their decision, because they are doing exactly what the sarcastic remark suggests before the remark is made, and thus the remark makes no sense at all.
If by some chance he's actually mocking the decision to
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What does it matter that they can't read the text? PDFs aren't about content, they are about preserving the layout.
Just a guess here, but that is probably the exact reason they don't want government agencies to use PDFs for all their forms.
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OZ gov't is a bunch of whiners (Score:2)
The Aussie government failed to recommend a standard that supplants PDF in such a way that it handles all the cases one would expect to handle. So what's the point of this exercise that the OZ gov't did other than basically say without words... 'we should publish everything in XML documents since at least those can be parsed to some degree?
You know, there should be an industry-standard sheet of paper (Letter/AF) that meets the JAWS difficulty test, much in the same way there are test HTML pages that test w
Isn't it ironic (Score:2)
Not a problem with format (Score:2)
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you would think bureaucrats, with their stickler for regulation and procedure, would be able to understand that not every PDF is created equal
You answer your own implied question: being sticklers for regulation and procedure means they don't have to, you know, think about what they're doing.
Poorly created PDF files (Score:4, Insightful)
So basically they are saying that *because* it is possible to produce a shoddy PDF file which is basically an image dump, that this is reason enough not to use the format?
By this same reckoning, you could produce a really shoddy HTML page which also consists of images and no text... Virtually any format could be misused in this way.
So what's the alternative? That we all revert back to ASCII text since its incapable of holding graphics?
Personally i hate seeing poorly designed websites or pdf files as i described here, where the text is actually an embedded image (or worse - a flash file) and there is no clickable index etc.
We should probably start naming and shaming pdf creation software, and those who use (or misuse) such tools.
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So basically they are saying that *because* it is possible to produce a shoddy PDF file which is basically an image dump, that this is reason enough not to use the format?
I think it's more a case of saying that PDFs shouldn't be used inappropriately. If you're producing something which really has to be viewed and/or printed in a visually consistent way analogous to a magazine page, it's hard to beat PDFs. If you're producing something that is to be used in any other way, PDFs blow.
This has long been my beef with PDFs, this inappropriate use. If the document is intended as a reference, or is text-heavy and intended to be read more than viewed, PDFs and the second-worst choice
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Exactly, it's a presentation format - it should be used for presentations.
It shouldn't be used for documents that need to be used for anything other than presentation.
It would be nice if PDF were a more all-around document format, but it wasn't designed that way and changing that is difficult at best.
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Ascii art to the rescue!
Of all the reasons to hate Adobe (Score:2)
Re:A subset of PDF files? (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the number of times government officials around the world have failed to understand the difference between removing text in a PDF and replacing it with black and just covering the text over with black, they'd probably get it wrong about half the time even with best intentions.
Re:A subset of PDF files? (Score:4, Informative)
To make the documents accessible, they will need to create them in such a way that the screen reader can read the text for the blind person. Believe it or not, extracting the text contents from a pdf file is actually a very non-trivial problem. Mostly the problems are caused by pdf authoring tools that render each glyph separately. The text extractor then has no idea about which characters belong to each line and has to guess based on the baseline of the character. Another problem is non-ascii characters and how the authoring tool decides to render them. The venerable free software tool pdflatex uses composite characters (basically it renders multiple glyps on top of each other) which makes it impossible to accurately extract the text.
So no, it is not about stupidity or bad Microsoft softare. PDF just is unsuitable for accessable documents.
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PDF is not in itself a security hole... Adobe's reader on the other hand has many, and the problem is made worse by the apparent monoculture - many people think pdf is a proprietary format and that only the adobe tools are capable of reading it... I have even seen mac users download and install adobe reader because they think its required, had they simply attempted to open the pdf file in the first place they would have found that OSX ships with a much better PDF reader out of the box.
When anything has 90%+
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Who wants dead tree format anyway? Most times I follow a link and discover the content is PDF, I give it a pass. If you want to publish on the web, use HTML.
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Are you talking about modifying existing pdf files, or simply creating new ones?
OpenOffice/LibreOffice has a PDF Import extension which does a pretty good job of editing, i also found via a very quick google search a pdfedit program on sourceforge - http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfedit/ [sourceforge.net]
As for creating pdf files, there are countless programs for doing that, openoffice, pdflatex, virtually anything that can print to postscript combined with ps2pdf etc etc etc.
Sure, HTML is preferable to PDF for web content
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Most times I follow a link and discover the content is PDF, I give it a pass. If you want to publish on the web, use HTML.
And if you *truly* want to ensure it *always* looks the same *everywhere*, you use PDF
PDF is total fail. (Score:2)
There isn't one good reason in the entire world to make sure a document "looks the same everywhere."
What we need is that the document is (1) readable, (2) orderly, and (3) conforms to the reader's needs.
When you have someone with poor vision, you don't want some tiny font used for anything, and zooming the page blows the context right out the window. The reader needs to be able to set the font, and the color(s), a
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There isn't one good reason in the entire world to make sure a document "looks the same everywhere."
Printing.
What we need is that the document is (1) readable, (2) orderly, and (3) conforms to the reader's needs.
Define we. What my clients need is a file to look exactly like they sent. Like it or hate it in the real world PDF solves this quite well.
PDF is unfriendly and the very idea that the author has to set the absolute look of the document reeks of elitism, misplaced "artistic" intent at the expense of readability and usability.
Elitism!? "How dare you print something for me that doesn't look right!" It doesn't need to be friendly, it needs to perform.
And then there is editing -- a document you can't edit and/or annotate is crippled -- and PDF encourages this unfriendly behavior.
Not every tool is ideal for every task. I liken WMV to PDF, ideal for final presentation, which is why they are sending it to me.
The ideal solution at this point in time is, has been, and is likely to remain, HTML, which resolves every one of those critical problems
Indeed. Enjoy your random note looking documents!
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HTML documents are printable. Fail.
Everyone.
Here, let me fix that for you: What your clients want... because they are misdirected... is a document that only looks one way. You should disabuse them of that notion, really. That's what I do. Failing that, I tell them to go away.
I'm not an interior decorator. I'm not concerned about matching the writing tone to the fonts, and I don't flap my wrists in f
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HTML documents are printable. Fail.
I think you're confusing "printing" with the narrow definition of printer, I am referring to publishing. You can take the bus instead of owning a car but buses don't nearly provide the same level of accessibility or convenience of a car.
Everyone.
Obviously.
I'm not an interior decorator.
Some people are and in many professions precision matters. Contracts are an excellent example of this. It appears you're unfamiliar with corporate branding requirements or trademark usage requirements. Everyone is not you. It's not about making you happy - it's abo
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there is a perl library for that
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So where is the free PDF editor? Never mind, there isn't one. You mean Open Office ?
Still... (Score:2)
Vanilla HTML is a much better answer. Let the reader control the format - separate the markup from the content, let the reader control the fonts, how emphasis displays, even link colors. Or move one step forward and use (basic!) CSS. PDF is overweight, slow, seriously buggy, can lock content, and is not available for all platforms. HTML readers are ubiquitous, fast, highly compressible and wide open. Heck, I can display and edit a basic HTML file, formatted nicely according to the HTML, on my 1970's-era 64
Re:A subset of PDF files? (Score:4, Insightful)
Learn how to operate another program? Spend from the budget for another set of licenses? (the horror)... start to use Open Office or the like?
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Last time I checked Adobe reader had built-in OCR and text-to-speech even in the free Acrobat Reader. The IT director was just plain lazy, or there's some lobbying.
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Last time I checked Adobe reader had built-in OCR and text-to-speech even in the free Acrobat Reader. The IT director was just plain lazy, or there's some lobbying.
Built-in OCR? I can see the "read out loud" option in version 8.2.5 but I'll be damned if I can see anything like OCR.
The only "free" (note quotes) OCR package I've ever got to work reliably is the one that is built-in to Microsoft's "Document Imaging" (.mdi) application.
[disclaimer]It's "free" if you already have access to Microsoft Office. I don't think it's widely known that there is built-in OCR functionality. Now if only there was a free mdi to pdf converter that keeps the ocr information. (sigh) [/d
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And the OCR engine is the worst I've ever used. It takes me back to the days of 1998.
Re:A subset of PDF files? (Score:5, Informative)
ISO already has created the standardized PDF/X subsets [wikipedia.org] used widely in the publishing industry. They lack support for extra features like scripting and other extensions.
The main problem with PDF for document archives is that it is a presentation format and doesn't adequately preserve text structure since everything is broken down into lines of text or individually placed glyphs. Analysis of a page layout can only bring back so much. There are better ways to store data that offer more versatility.
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XML to the rescue!
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Yeah, it's not like regular browsers could display XHTML.
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There is also the PDF/A standard, which is designed for exactly this purpose. It's a subset of the PDF spec for long term archiving of documents and it disallows a lot of things like scripting, similar to PDF/X.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A [wikipedia.org]
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There are better ways to store data that offer more versatility.
True. But few ways that offer absolute fidelity to an original paper document. And sometimes, thanks to opportunistic lawyers, an absolutely accurate rendering is more important than text structure. Try defending a medical malpractice lawsuit, and claiming that "well the text most certainly is the same and has not been tampered with, even though the document in our system looks a little bit different than the one in your hand, so it really is the same document"...
Sad, but true.
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So use paper. Don't expose the rest of us to a shitty format in order to excuse further legal excess. I find my sympathy level for doctors, litigants, judges and lawyers is approximately equal: zero. That green stuff you see when you look up? That's pond scum.
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So use paper.
Oh yeah, that's a most excellent way to store medical records. For sure. Thanks for the helpful suggestion. Not.
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Look, medical records should be fields in a database. Not on paper, not in PDF, not in text or HTML files. If there is text, it should be in a text or HTML field. Images embedded in the database should be JPEG or lossless PNG. If you don't put the medical records in a database, you have enormously compromised their primary utility: to be employed for the health of the patient (and others with similar problems.) To insist that PDF is required for medical records is to insist that things be the absolute leas
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To insist that PDF is required for medical records is to insist that things be the absolute least functional they could be. Don't go there.
Wow, just wow.
Yes, much of the data should be fields in a database.
However, there is this notion of a "report" from a "specialist" which might gather together much information, some of it data, some of it image, and some of it narrative, in order to be sent to a "referring physician", either "primary care" in many cases, or even to several different "specialties" in more complex cases. Such a "report" may contain, in addition to the data and/or narrative description of the particulars of the patient conditi
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If my usability manuals are to be believed, people have neglected the safeties of nuclear reactors because those things are a chore and do nothing anyway. If you don't want your users to do something, then you design your system so that they never get the option.
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Which is not at all a reason to not allow PDFs.
After all, if people aren't going to follow the rules anyway, what makes them think banning PDFs will prevent government agencies from using PDFs? If the rules will actually be enforced, why not simply add a rule that the PDF in question be accessible?
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The problem is as usual, one of incompetence and ignorance.
Incompetent users create websites without appropriate alt tags, and those same users create PDF files which are also incorrectly created...
Ignorant users then view these files and don't notice, or don't care, that they have not been created correctly.
Because only a very small minority of users actually do bother to check, they simply get ignored.
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No, that would be analogous to allowing PDF, but requiring the text portions actually be text.
And that would actually be reasonable.
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Working as a web developer for the Canadian gov't, we had some similar rules for content. Mainly, you always had to provide it in the most accessible form possible. This usually meant HTML > PDF > Office Document. However, it was always on a best effort/convenience basis. So, if you posted PowerPoint slides, you also had to post the PDF versions, since making a PDF version was dead simple. However, we certainly weren't required to go all out and make a usable HTML version as well.
We also offered many
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That is a silly analogy. In your case, we are talking about a VERY high cost for not following the safety procedures. In mine, we are talking about, at worst, a no-cost scenario, where a disabled user cannot access a document that would not have been available to him otherwise. He has lost nothing, but the vast majority of users have gained.
Let me offer you analogy. Someone offers you a lottery ticket for free. If you take it you either lose the lottery, in which case you are exactly where you started. If y
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Of course, if you had simply used HTML as your only target, no one anywhere would have a problem, and the job would be enormously simplifed. You should be asking yourself, "Why is PDF even used?" And the answer is, "No good reason." All PDF does is lock the display format, offer the opportunity to make the document read-only and less accessible, all of which are *entirely* bad things.
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Is that a problem of the pdf format or a problem of one specific pdf reader?
Re:So can any format (Score:4, Informative)
No it doesn't sound like a bozo official since that style of pdf was specifically excluded from the user study they ran.
You could of course skim the report and know that, but I guess that would mean you couldn't launch into meaningless rants.
Of ocurse if you did that you'd know the report is available in PDF format which I guess would just launch you on a different meaningless rant.
PDF Format is like ATM Machine and PIN Number (Score:2)
Portable Document Format... Format.
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Yes, welcome to English.
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It is appropriate for any acronym for which the underlying meaning is no longer clearly understood by people who use the acronym.
Most people don't know that ATM means Automated Teller Machine; ATM has become the name of the machine, not just an acronym for the name, so it's appropriate to call it a machine even though it also calls itself a machine. Same with PIN, most people don't recognize it as Personal Identification Number, so it's appropriate to call it a PIN number even though it also calls itself a
Re:So can any format (Score:4, Informative)
You do know that in Australia it is law that a company make their website accessible for vision impaired if at all possible.
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Why no try looking at the study before jumping to your conclusion?
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Because the case you stated was the one the explicitely excluded so either you didn't review it or you are just trying to confuse things on purpose.
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.
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Yes it is, these shouldn't be features, it should be simple for a text-speech program to follow without having some tacked on standard that you now have to expect everyone to follow.
The layout should compliment the data, not vice versa. If you have to think for one second "will my document be able to be accessed by vision impaired" then that is one second more than it should be, if you type three columns of text in a continuous flow, it should be able to read it back as such without having to go over it lat
simple solution, totally wrong... (Score:2)
It then can append a footer to each page stating "the creator of this PDF is a google-certified nimrod".
(I've always found it a bit galling that some paper catalog companies I've dealt with thought it reasonable to create a web presence by posting PDFs with scans of each page their physical catalog. Good luck searching through that!)
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Yes. It costs money, whereas their photocopier already has a scan to pdf facility.
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Even if documents don't include mathematical equations, there's an obvious plain text solution - latex.
It outputs to pdf and i'm sure there exist browser extensions to render to html on the fly.
Though gmail does pdf-html automatically when viewing attachments
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