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.

In other news

[Anonymous Coward]

The Australian government requires all computer monitors have a braille touchscreen added in case a blind person wants to use one.

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."

Re:Security

[palegray.net]

For purposes of this particular discussion, I don't give a rip about security vulnerabilities from exploits in PDFs. We're talking about the accessibility of content that by all rights should be easily accessible to the vision impaired. On that note, it is firmly the fault of absolute morons (who are, in my experience, in the minority of content producers, by the way) who elect to convert text-based documents to PDF docs consisting of nothing more than one rendered image per page of content. It's actually beyond moronic, and I would formally reprimand anyone I found doing it with anything that was destined for even semi-public consumption. Above all else, it largely eliminates accessibility for everyone, including folks like myself who might idly attempt to search such PDFs for a specific term, and wind up screwed, because the idiot who created the document couldn't be bothered with operating an elementary piece of OCR software or gasp seeing if there was an alternate origin format that could likely be exported to a full-text-indexed PDF document with three clicks of the mouse.