3 ms·

Why not just mandate that the content must be accessible to the blind/deaf/etc and let the implementors figure out how best to make that true? For example some

by shawnz 6y ago

Why not just mandate that the content must be accessible to the blind/deaf/etc and let the implementors figure out how best to make that true? For example some municipalities might just choose to provide alternate formats in addition to PDF and that might be fine for them.

pnutjam 6y ago
Theoretically this would be covered under federal law, but it needs a lawsuit.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
as per my original post, you might not be able to mandate something like that given your legal system. If I have a law saying that a layout needs to look like X layout and X layout is not achievable if it also needs to accessible then depending on the type of legal system you are in you can say Law Y supersedes all previous laws and requires you to make all PDFs accessible. If a legally mandated layout cannot be made accessible then the closest similar layout that still meets accessibility requirements should be used instead (long descriptions of how closest is determined in legal format would of course follow) I think this will work in the common law system, but I don't think it would work in a Napoleonic system of law (could be wrong, just think you would need to specify exactly what laws it superseded) As an example when I was part of the efaktura project for the Danish Government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OIOXML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OIOXML when the law was published mandating that all invoices to the government be sent as oioxml efaktura we ran into the problem that there was a previous law requiring that all telecommunications invoices (or maybe utility invoices, I forget) be sent with information that there was no provision for in the UBL standard that efaktura was based on. Luckily I had introduced an extension method that we could use to put the extra data in with, but otherwise we would have had two competing laws. As far as mandating layouts in government PDFS, you normally see that kind of thing in military documents, but laws and bureaucracies are such that there might be any number of rules and regulations that cannot be overwritten in a system by drafting an overarching accessibility bill.

by shawnz 6y ago

pnutjam 6y ago

Theoretically this would be covered under federal law, but it needs a lawsuit.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago

as per my original post, you might not be able to mandate something like that given your legal system. If I have a law saying that a layout needs to look like X layout and X layout is not achievable if it also needs to accessible then depending on the type of legal system you are in you can say Law Y supersedes all previous laws and requires you to make all PDFs accessible. If a legally mandated layout cannot be made accessible then the closest similar layout that still meets accessibility requirements should be used instead (long descriptions of how closest is determined in legal format would of course follow) I think this will work in the common law system, but I don't think it would work in a Napoleonic system of law (could be wrong, just think you would need to specify exactly what laws it superseded) As an example when I was part of the efaktura project for the Danish Government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OIOXML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OIOXML when the law was published mandating that all invoices to the government be sent as oioxml efaktura we ran into the problem that there was a previous law requiring that all telecommunications invoices (or maybe utility invoices, I forget) be sent with information that there was no provision for in the UBL standard that efaktura was based on. Luckily I had introduced an extension method that we could use to put the extra data in with, but otherwise we would have had two competing laws. As far as mandating layouts in government PDFS, you normally see that kind of thing in military documents, but laws and bureaucracies are such that there might be any number of rules and regulations that cannot be overwritten in a system by drafting an overarching accessibility bill.