Re: PDF techniques

Hi Mike,

In general the W3C (at least via WCAG) doesn’t make recommendations for which technologies people should use. It was intended to be cross-technology:
https://www.w3.org/TR/wcag2-req/#intro

If such a recommendation were made, it would come from above the WCAG level.

PDFs can be made accessible (including reflow, with caveats), so we should keep the techniques up to date if we can.

FWIW, one of the intents of WCAG 3 is that it is outcome based. With technology-specific methods underneath outcomes, it should be more obvious which technologies are easier to make things accessible.

Kind regards,

-Alastair


From: Mike Gifford
Is there any way to recommend that folks reconsider the use of PDFs in the W3C? I’d love it if the W3C followed the UK’s model:
https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should-be-published-in-html-and-not-pdf/

So much web traffic is mobile, and however accessible PDF/UA are, they really do not scale well for smaller devices.

And yes, ask most folks who use assistive technology about PDFs, and you generally hear groans from users. They are just far too easy to produce, and too hard to produce accessibly.

When the US Federal government can’t even make 1/3rd of their PDFs accessible in 2023, maybe we need to rethink the use of this format.
https://www.justice.gov/crt/page/file/1569331/download

Another thing that we could recommend is that because PDFs do not reflow, that agencies need to produce a large print version, if they are going to claim that their PDF is accessible. Low vision users shouldn’t have to ask for a large print version of a PDF. If an organization claims to produce accessible PDFs, it should include a regular and large print version by default. Both of which should be readable by assistive technology.

But really, HTML, MHTML, EPUB3, there are other options, and people considering PDFs need to be informed that there are limitations in the format. For accessibility and user experience, the W3C has a role to move people toward formats which inherently are more accessible.

Heck, why aren’t folks just posting an OpenOffice (or Word) original document, and a PDF, print friendly version? That would really require the least change to workflow and probably provide the best over-all approach to dealing with the future of PDFs.

I do think in 2023, we should be considering if PDFs are part of a modern approach to accessible digital content. PDFs really should be seen as part of an organization’s technical debt. Yes, authors love them. But they don’t love them because it is easy to produce inclusive content in them.

Mike


Mike Gifford, Senior Strategist, CivicActions
Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer
https://civicactions.com<https://civicactions.com/>    |  https://accessibility.civicactions.com<https://accessibility.civicactions.com/>
http://twitter.com/mgifford |  http://linkedin.com/in/mgifford


On May 5, 2023 at 12:18:45 PM, Alastair Campbell (acampbell@nomensa.com<mailto:acampbell@nomensa.com>) wrote:
Hi everyone,

Frances has been doing the much-needed work of updating old techniques, but there are some sticking points on the PDF techniques.

If anyone can help with these aspects we can update them, otherwise we’ll just have to remove the out-dated bits:


  *   There is a list of alternatives<https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG20-TECHS/pdf_notes.html#pdf_notes_acc-sup_files_applications> to Acrobat Pro but it includes some things which don’t exist anymore. Can anyone provide an updated list?
  *   There are many examples (in each technique) that use a version 2.x of OpenOffice. Can anyone update those to a more modern version? (Probably of libre office).
These are both things which are good to have, but in their current state are not helpful.

If we no one can take those one, we can remove them.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

--

@alastc / www.nomensa.com<http://www.nomensa.com/>