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Aussie Government Gives PDF the Thumbs Down
littlekorea writes "The central IT office of the Australian Government has advised its agencies to offer alternatives to Adobe's Portable Document Format to ensure folks with impaired vision are able to consume information on the Web. A Government-funded study found that PDFs can present themselves as image-only files to screen readers, rendering the information contained within them unreadable for the vision impaired."
A thumbs down in the southern hemisphere is the same as a thumbs up in the northern hemisphere, as long as you name the file bruce.pdf. It saves confusion.
XML to the rescue!
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
What does it matter that they can't read the text? PDFs aren't about content, they are about preserving the layout. At least that is what it seems like to me when I am foolish enough to try and read PDFs on a device with a different number of pixels than the person who made the PDF file.
If the content matters at all, someone should invent a technology that allows text to be tagged somehow with indicators of the MEANING of that portion of text, like 'this is a title', and let the display device render the text according to how the reader can best view it. It sounds crazy, and it may take a few decades to do, but think of the benefits.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Nonsense! When I visit that site, I see a HUGE button and some normal, selectable text ("Click here to get the plug-in"). A screenreader would do fine with that. Oh, wait...