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> A lot of people here seem to knock PDF, but I love it. People will disabilities that rely on screen-readers don't love it. There is no such a problem with HT
by aikah 6y ago
> A lot of people here seem to knock PDF, but I love it.
People will disabilities that rely on screen-readers don't love it. There is no such a problem with HTML/CSS which should be the norm for internet documents.
> With PDF, everyone sees the same thing.
Yes, provided you can see at first place...
- IncRnd 6y agoAdobe Reader has an option to Read Aloud PDF files. I don't know how well or poor that works, but I'm writing this comment just in case you were not aware of that function.
- z3t4 6y agoThe problem is that you cant parse PDFs reliably. Half of the time they are just bitmap images from a scanner.
- jlokier 6y agoSome Word documents are like that too! Can't blame the PDF format if the source material is a bunch of scans.
- daveFNbuck 6y agohtml/css has a similar problem. A lot of my email is just a collection of images that contain text.
- franga2000 6y agoI absolutely hate those, but the HTML spec does require the alt attribute which is actually used in practice quite commonly.
- daveFNbuck 6y agoI've never read the HTML spec directly until checking it now to verify your comment. I usually use MDN, which says that the alt attribute is not mandatory. [1] [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Img https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Im...
- bregma 6y agoNon-conforming email should be filtered by the scam filter before it ever gets to your MUA.
- daveFNbuck 6y agoWhat is that email not conforming to?
- czechdeveloper 6y agoThis compain can be applied to paper too. PDF is not much more than precise document to be printed or exactly visually presented.
- monadic2 6y agoIs PDF not supposed to improve on paper...? I'm rather surprised at the revelation that PDF is not accessible.
- czechdeveloper 6y agoMy use is exclusively "this will end up on paper in a minute", so any improvement would be irrelevant. Why would I want document type that can't even refloat on display size to represent any longer written text that is supposed to be consumed on digital device?
- monadic2 6y agoI would ask a blind person.
- dirkt 6y agoPDF is tied to page layout. PDF is a way to digitally describe something that's intended to be printed to paper, on a sheet of a certain size. And as a format, it's much more sane than, say, Word or Excel. Even if the focus on "where do I put this glyph" means the original text isn't in there by default.
- monadic2 6y agoYea, but that's a terrible explanation for lack of basic accessibility in 2020. Literally just laziness. FWIW this is not a technical barrier; it would be absolutely trivial to associated blocks of non-flowed text with the layed out text.
- jacquesm 6y ago> There is no such a problem with HTML/CSS which should be the norm for internet documents. It should be. But meanwhile everybody seems to think it is perfectly ok that there is a bunch of JavaScript that needs to run before the document will display any text at all and how that text makes it into the document is anybody's guess.
- ehnto 6y agoIt was an amazing shift in priorities that I feel like I somehow missed the discussion for. We went from being worried about hiding content with CSS to sending nothing but script tags in the document body within 5 years or so. The only concern we had when making the change seemed to be "but can Google read it?". When the answer to that became "Uh maybe" we jumped the shark. My bashful take is that nobody told the rest of the web development world that they aren't Facebook, and they don't need Facebook like technology. So everyone is serving React apps hosted on AWS microservices filled in by GraphQL requests in order to render you a blog article. I am being hyperbolic of course, but I was taken completely off guard by how quickly we ditched years of best practices in favour of a few JS UI libraries.