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

What about Flash? Check out this site:

[whoever57]

Look at this page. It's for a local police department in a city that has lots of blind people because of the presence of the California School for the Blind. This is the first page that Google lists for the site. I can't imagine that a screen reader can make anything of the front page and there are no navigation buttons.

So the problem is fancy formatting.

[robbak]

And the rest of us say "Get rid of it". We do not access government documents to be blown away by their totally rad page style. We access them for information, and extracting the information from the glumph that encases it is sometimes hard for the best of us.

html all the way. Any formatting you cannot fit in a simple stylsheet can get left out.