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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 9
by 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 agoI 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 agoIt's been a while since I've looked at the spec but I don't remember anything like that.
- jimhefferon 6y agoYes, 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 agoCould 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 agoThe problem is the PDF spec itself is not screen reader friendly.
- myself248 6y agoPDF 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.
- voltagex_ 6y agoThe 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 agoIt 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 agoIn general even trying to copy-paste from pdflatex document is a nightmare.