Accessibility and Re: [LINK] Smart Card Submissions Online

[Michael Wood]

Irene
see the page at:
http://deyalexander.com/presentations/accessibility-pdfformat/

This is old so I've copied Dey in to see if there is an update.

Michael
____________________________________________________________
Michael Wood                          mikewood at deakin.edu.au
Library Web Manager Deakin University phone: +61 3 5227 8231
Geelong, Victoria 3217 Australia      fax:   +61 3 5227 8000
____________________________________________________________



Quoting Irene Graham <rene.lk at libertus.net>:

> On Wed, 30 Aug 2006 14:59:51 +1000, Tom Worthington wrote:
>> I wrote Mon, 07 Aug 2006 08:44:59 +1000 (was: "Access Card Taskforce
>> Submissions"):
>>
>>> ... I did suggest the KPMG report on the card be made available in an
>>> accessible format. What was provided was a bitmap image of the
>>> report, which was difficult to read and search. It would also be
>>> inaccessible to the disabled, which may be unlawful. ...
>>>
>>
>> Had a call from the Consumer and Privacy Task Force on the Health and
>> Social Services Access Card (aka "Smart Card Taskforce") to say that
>> they are seeing if they can get submissions in an accessible format.
>
> I (as EFA) also received a call from them.
>
>> The submissions which they have received, in PDF and/or RTF, are at
>> <http://www.humanservices.gov.au/access/discussion_papers/>.
>
> Actually, the submissions they received in PDF are not on that page yet
> (EFA's was sent as PDF file containing text) because they claimed that PDF
> is not "accessible" and so want the submissions sent again in... wait for
> it... Word DOC or RTF format (i.e. MS proprietary formats).
>
> The person who phoned me said they'd been informed by the Disability
> Commissioner that departments that publish documents only in PDF could be
> found in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) (see more about
> that below).
>
> [...]
>> Unfortunately, the original "KPMG Access Card Business Case" is still
>> in its difficult-to-read image PDF format
>> <http://www.humanservices.gov.au/modules/resources/access_card/kpmg_acc
>> ess_card_business_case.pdf>.
>
> Exactly. Hence it's not credible that they can't publish submissions
> received only in PDF (containing text) for fear of breaching the DDA. If
> the Department was at any risk of being found in breach of the DDA it would
> be most likely to be as a result of publishing that government commissioned
> report in a format that is completely inaccessible to vision impaired
> people, rather than publishing submissions sent to them by members of the
> public in PDF format.
>
> I contacted a senior representative of the Disability Commissioner's office
> yesterday by phone and received verbal advice, followed by an email
> confirmation this morning that said, among other things, that the
> Commission does advise Commonwealth Departments that in their own
> publications they should provide alternatives to PDF, but have never
> published advice that governments "taking public submissions must or should
> refuse to publish material in PDF, and do not hold any such view".
>
> I also phoned an organisation representing/advocating for vision impaired
> people and was advised that PDF files can be problematic for vision
> impaired people but this generally depends on the content of the particular
> file. Briefly, PDF files that are an image are not accessible, and PDF
> files that contain text with complex formatting, e.g. such as in column
> layouts etc, are very likely to problematic unless the file creator
> inserted PDF-tags.
>
> That seems to match my previous understanding about the issue, which was
> -partly- based on the fact that Google's "view in HTML" feature has no
> problem converting EFA's PDF submissions containing only text to HTML, so
> I've long assumed the text would also be able to be read by speech
> recognition software etc.
>
> However, if anyone knows anything different in relation to accessibility of
> PDF files that contain basically only ordinary text paragraphs, I'd be very
> interested to know. While there is a lot of stuff about PDF findable by eb
> search, but I've not yet been able to find anything that makes clear
> exactly what the situation is with PDF files that only have text in paras,
> not also in columns, tables, etc.
>
> EFA doesn't have a copy of our submission in DOC or RTF - our submissions
> are created in HTML and then converted to PDF and after several discussions
> with the departmental representative, I've been advised that they will be
> making submissions provided in PDF available. Meanwhile, EFA's is already
> available on our own web site in W3C standards compliant HTML:
> http://www.efa.org.au/Publish/efasubm-dhs-accesscard-2006.html
>
> Irene
>
>
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