Thinking through things: Adobe Acrobat accessibility seminar, 3 March 2011

seminar at National Museum of Australia, conducted by Jacqui van Teulingen and Andrew Kirkpatrick

Key points

* we already do a lot of what was covered
* seminar was for Techos, but the questions were so dumb, and hand-raising responses to e.g. do you use template, v. small
* look out for testing techniques for PDFs, end of March
* AGIMO recommends changing publishing processes so that business units know how to construct and check the documents
* and basically you need to consider why you are using any format

Australian Government leading the world on accessibility. Following on from the National Disability Strategy, Jacqui van T. group created the Web Accessibility National Transition Strategy - the Aust. Govt's implementation of WCAG 2.0

The goal is inclusive and accessible communities

Joint approach for all 3 tiers of govt was negotiated by Online and Communications Council

The lead agencies are helping solve 'mitigation projects', of which PDF accessibility is Number 1 - because the majority of complaints are about PDFs, and PDFs are the second most common format.

The key finding of the PDF study was the very poor document design of many documents, not the format itself.

What are the areas that need attention?

* semantic structure of the document
* image equivalents
* understandable information
* proper identification of the language
* resizable text
* colour and contrast

Learned about

* the role map in Acrobat (mapping styles to tags)
Note that assistive tech needs HTML names

Slides to come - to show what else must have been done for the PDF to be accessible, not just pass the full accessibility check

* forget the 'Print to PDF' exists - this print method cannot access the DOM, so cannot make accessible PDFs

* alt text is in diff. place in Word 2007 (under 'Size')

* text box is read when it was created

* tables: row headings can't be indicated the way col. headings can: this has to be done in Acrobat

InDesign: set reading order in InDesign. Method to add - 'Agg untagged items' to structure; add new attribute 'Alt' (Andrew has requested this be added). Note that bullet list is not possible to handle for tagged PDF in InDesign, neither is table headings.

* showed us how to repair PDFs - crashes!

* Redaction - note to add '[redacted info] ' overlay text to blacked out blocks