[LINK] Government gives thumbs down to PDF format

Ivan Trundle ivan at itrundle.com
Wed Dec 1 22:26:50 AEDT 2010


I just loathe the use of 'alternate' when the author means 'alternative'...

It's not hard to create single-column text PDFs, but give a designer a head of steam, and you're in an alternate universe.

iT

On 01/12/2010, at 10:03 PM, Ben McGinnes wrote:

> On 1/12/10 9:22 PM, Kim Holburn wrote:
>>> 
>>> While the use of PDF files was prolific and preferred over other
>>> formats, the study also found that:
>>> 
>>> • 80 percent of respondents do not complement the use of PDF files
>>> without alternate formats;
>>> • PDF files are used by a wide variety of organisations but those
>>> are blind or have low vision experience many problems with
>>> multi-column designs;
>>> • Screen readers are unable to interact with a document saved as an
>>> image-only PDF file because images are not accessible to people who
>>> are blind.
>>> • Employing workaround methods to access inaccessible PDF files
>>> results in a degraded experience when compared to accessing
>>> equivalent documents in other formats.
>> 
>> http://www.finance.gov.au/publications/pdf-accessibility-study/index.html
> 
> There is, of course, a real irony here in that the report is published
> as a PDF.  At least it is also available as HTML too, but that's only
> on the website, there isn't a non-PDF version available for download.




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