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."

Comments

So can any format

[AvitarX]

So can a webpage, or a word document.

I suppose a pure text file cannot, but at the expense of other meta-data. Why not require PDFs to have word position OCR done (part of Acrobat Pro, so hardly a chore), and keep info like page number and position on page for scans. For non-scans it would take effort to destroy the text data.

Hell, even in ASCII I could use something like figlets to generate large letters (for easy reading), and destroy assessibility.

This sounds like bozo official had a scanned hard-copy in PDF, ran into trouble, and blamed the format (even though it would offer a good way to handle the situation built in) rather than the other bozo that scanned it, and didn't use the built in OCR function. I'm pretty sure these people would do the same with HTML, OOXML or ODF; it's not the formats fault.

This is ridiculous.

[palegray.net]

The file format is not to blame. Morons who scan text-based documents into PDF files, saving each page as an image are to blame. Even in 1995 or so, when I was first exposed to OCR technology, it worked "fairly well." Anyone converting text to PDF by scanning pages in as images these days is a complete moron, and a huge variety of applications now support exporting text-based documents directly to PDF format with full text search and indexing capabilities intact, along with fancy formatting like gasp italics, bold script, superscript, subscript, numbers, fairly complex mathematical expressions, etc. Hell, images can even be embedded in PDF docs that are largely textual content (holy wow, the technology!), along with alternate text and hyperlinks. In other words, "WTFMATE."