5 ms·

And the problem with that is that the screen reader tools are $1200, because of the huge associated R&D costs and incredibly small target market. The sad thing

And the problem with that is that the screen reader tools are $1200, because of the huge associated R&D costs and incredibly small target market. The sad thing is that the very complexity required to implement a screen reader is soley because of the technical nightmare information accessibility currently is. It's reasonable to think that "if only" everything could be made ubiquitous and everyone (= developers) could become collectively aware of these accessibility considerations, maybe there would be a shift towards greater semanticity. Thing is, though, that NVDA is open source, and iOS has put a built-in free screen-reader in the hands of every iPhone user... and not much has changed. So it's basically one of those technologies forever stuck in the "initial surge of moonshot R&D to break new ground and realign status quo" phase. :(

mikepurvis 6y ago
How much good would moonshot-level R&D even be capable of doing? Without realigning the world around a new portable format for printable documents, isn't this 99% Adobe's problem to solve? Or are the hooks there to make much more accessible PDFs, and the issue is that various popular generators of those documents (especially WYSIWYG ones like MS Word) either don't populate them, or perhaps don't even have the needed semantic data in the first place? For my part, I would love to see PDFs which can seamlessly be viewed in continuous, unpaged mode (for example, for better consumption on a small-screen device like a phone or e-reader). Even just the minimal effort required to tag page-specific header/footer type data could make a big difference here, and I expect that type of semantic information would be useful for a screen reader also.
- harshreality 6y ago
  I thought flowed text in PDFs was possible, but rarely used because it removes half of the benefit of PDFs (that is, page-exact references and rendering). There already is a solution, based on html and very easy to deal with: epub. Publishers are gradually shifting to it, even for things like science textbooks, as they realize that PDFs might look pretty but they're a usability nightmare. There are still some stupid things publishers do with epubs, but they'll get it right eventually; meanwhile the main text and font settings can be overridden by ereaders.
  - thayne 6y ago
    It's been a while since I've looked at the spec but I don't remember anything like that.
    - jimhefferon 6y ago
      Yes, you can reflow. https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-accessibility-features.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-ac...
- roywiggins 6y ago
  Could governments insist that PDF software they buy be screen-reader friendly? If this were rigorously done, you'd have all government documents be readable by default, and then anyone else who ran the same software commercially would, too. You could also impose requirements on public companies to provide corporate documents in accessible formats- these sorts of documents are already regulated. There's various levers that could be pulled, maybe those aren't the right ones. But you could do it.
  - thayne 6y ago
    The problem is the PDF spec itself is not screen reader friendly.
    - myself248 6y ago
      PDF is mostly just a wrapper around Postscript, isn't it? You could just put the original text in comments or something, wrapped in more tags to say what it is.
      - jjgreen 6y ago
        PDF is a document format, Postscript is a Turing complete programming language (and rather a fun one IMHO).
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        No, the ideas are the same, but it follows another implementation concept.
    - voltagex_ 6y ago
      The spec isn't, but you can make accessible PDFs. https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/pdf/pdf-accessibility-overview.html https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/pdf/pdf-accessibility-ov... Accessible PDFs are also more easily machine readable.
    - pdfsage 6y ago
      It most certainly is! ISO 32000-1 (PDF 1.7) and ISO 32000-2 (PDF 2.0) are both compliant with PDF/UA (ISO 14289) - the standard for PDF accessibility
- mwcampbell 6y ago
  > Or are the hooks there to make much more accessible PDFs, and the issue is that various popular generators of those documents (especially WYSIWYG ones like MS Word) either don't populate them, or perhaps don't even have the needed semantic data in the first place? Tagged PDF is a thing, and MS Word supports it. THe problem is the very long tail of programs that generate PDFs and don't support tagged PDF. Even some widely used PDF generators, like pdflatex, don't generate tagged PDF, at least not by default.
  - afiori 6y ago
    In general even trying to copy-paste from pdflatex document is a nightmare.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Folcon 6y ago
I'm not sure there isn't a middle solution? What about a screenreader emulator? I go to a website and it offers me the ability to upload a pdf, link to a website and then shows it to me like a screenreader would. There may already be good tools that do this, but until it's super easy to see and "everyone" knows about it, then people won't think, "better just give it a quick look in the screenreader". Obviously a next good step to more adoption, is clear feedback about how to easily fix whatever issues the person is seeing...

mikepurvis 6y ago

How much good would moonshot-level R&D even be capable of doing? Without realigning the world around a new portable format for printable documents, isn't this 99% Adobe's problem to solve? Or are the hooks there to make much more accessible PDFs, and the issue is that various popular generators of those documents (especially WYSIWYG ones like MS Word) either don't populate them, or perhaps don't even have the needed semantic data in the first place? For my part, I would love to see PDFs which can seamlessly be viewed in continuous, unpaged mode (for example, for better consumption on a small-screen device like a phone or e-reader). Even just the minimal effort required to tag page-specific header/footer type data could make a big difference here, and I expect that type of semantic information would be useful for a screen reader also.

harshreality 6y ago
I thought flowed text in PDFs was possible, but rarely used because it removes half of the benefit of PDFs (that is, page-exact references and rendering). There already is a solution, based on html and very easy to deal with: epub. Publishers are gradually shifting to it, even for things like science textbooks, as they realize that PDFs might look pretty but they're a usability nightmare. There are still some stupid things publishers do with epubs, but they'll get it right eventually; meanwhile the main text and font settings can be overridden by ereaders.
- thayne 6y ago
  It's been a while since I've looked at the spec but I don't remember anything like that.
  - jimhefferon 6y ago
    Yes, you can reflow. https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-accessibility-features.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-ac...
roywiggins 6y ago
Could governments insist that PDF software they buy be screen-reader friendly? If this were rigorously done, you'd have all government documents be readable by default, and then anyone else who ran the same software commercially would, too. You could also impose requirements on public companies to provide corporate documents in accessible formats- these sorts of documents are already regulated. There's various levers that could be pulled, maybe those aren't the right ones. But you could do it.
- thayne 6y ago
  The problem is the PDF spec itself is not screen reader friendly.
  - myself248 6y ago
    PDF is mostly just a wrapper around Postscript, isn't it? You could just put the original text in comments or something, wrapped in more tags to say what it is.
    - jjgreen 6y ago
      PDF is a document format, Postscript is a Turing complete programming language (and rather a fun one IMHO).
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      No, the ideas are the same, but it follows another implementation concept.
  - voltagex_ 6y ago
    The spec isn't, but you can make accessible PDFs. https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/pdf/pdf-accessibility-overview.html https://www.adobe.com/accessibility/pdf/pdf-accessibility-ov... Accessible PDFs are also more easily machine readable.
  - pdfsage 6y ago
    It most certainly is! ISO 32000-1 (PDF 1.7) and ISO 32000-2 (PDF 2.0) are both compliant with PDF/UA (ISO 14289) - the standard for PDF accessibility
mwcampbell 6y ago
> Or are the hooks there to make much more accessible PDFs, and the issue is that various popular generators of those documents (especially WYSIWYG ones like MS Word) either don't populate them, or perhaps don't even have the needed semantic data in the first place? Tagged PDF is a thing, and MS Word supports it. THe problem is the very long tail of programs that generate PDFs and don't support tagged PDF. Even some widely used PDF generators, like pdflatex, don't generate tagged PDF, at least not by default.
- afiori 6y ago
  In general even trying to copy-paste from pdflatex document is a nightmare.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Folcon 6y ago

I'm not sure there isn't a middle solution? What about a screenreader emulator? I go to a website and it offers me the ability to upload a pdf, link to a website and then shows it to me like a screenreader would. There may already be good tools that do this, but until it's super easy to see and "everyone" knows about it, then people won't think, "better just give it a quick look in the screenreader". Obviously a next good step to more adoption, is clear feedback about how to easily fix whatever issues the person is seeing...