{"id":460,"date":"2011-11-30T09:43:23","date_gmt":"2011-11-30T14:43:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/?p=460"},"modified":"2011-11-30T09:43:23","modified_gmt":"2011-11-30T14:43:23","slug":"adobe-and-accessibility-113011","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/?p=460","title":{"rendered":"Adobe and Accessibility 11\/30\/11"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the late 1990’s, Adobe (http:\/\/www.adobe.com<\/a>) introduced the PDF, or Portable Document Format.\u00a0 PDF documents are particularly useful for preserving layout and font information regardless of software and hardware platforms.\u00a0 Additionally, many authors enjoy having control over tighter document security, which has made PDF and variants of the PDF popular for E-Book publishing and online forms.<\/p>\n

In the early days of PDF authoring, there were no facilities available for making these documents accessible.\u00a0 There are still numerous legacy documents which are simply bitmap images of documents viewable in the Adobe Reader or some similar application.\u00a0 The only means of achieving accessibility for these documents is with optical character recognition (OCR) software.
\nThis is not considered a true form of accessibility, but it can make some content usable when modern accessibility conventions are not honored.<\/p>\n

In recent years, most publishing platforms, such as Adobe InDesign or MS Word can generate accessible PDF documents.\u00a0 These documents will be most accessible if document structure and formatting tools are used.\u00a0For example, use of headings, rather than simply using a larger or bold font, or creating columns using the “column” option in your software package of\u00a0 choice rather than using tab settings or spaces.<\/p>\n

Adobe Acrobat also\u00a0now features an Accessibility checker.\u00a0 This is a good means of identifying common fixes which may help to improve accessibility. PDF tags can also be manipulated with Adobe acrobat.\u00a0 These tags have no effect on the visual appearance of a PDF document.\u00a0They simply provide contextual information which helps accessibility software and automated tools such as search engines to properly identify parts of documents.<\/p>\n

Many accessibility experts\u00a0 still suggest providing alternative documents such as HTML when possible.\u00a0 As PDF viewers often require a plug-in or other PDF viewing software of some form, accessibility can be cumbersome.\u00a0 The Portable Document Format is alive and well on the Web and will be with us for the foreseeable future. Tutorials and videos on using the accessibility features
\nof all of their products can be found on the Adobe Website.<\/p>\n

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