[gui-talk] Fwd: Article: Australian Government gives Thumbs down to PDF

[Steve Pattison]

From:    Janelle Colquhoun jc at salubriousproductions.com
To:      VIP-L vip-l at freelists.org

www.itnews.com.au/News/240304,government-gives-thumbs-down-to-pdf-format.aspx

Government gives thumbs down to PDF format

By
John Hilvert
 on Dec 1, 2010 10:39 AM (2 days ago)
Filed under
Software

Adobe's document format lacks accessibility, says AGIMO.

The central IT office of Australia's Federal Government has requested that 
agencies consider the use of alternative file formats to Adobe's PDF.

The advice follows a study which found that while accessibility of the 
Portable Document Format (PDF) has improved over time and remains a popular 
format
for many organisations, it was less accessible to visually-impaired users.

Published by the Australian Government Information Management Office 
(AGIMO), "
The Australian Government's study into the Accessibility of the Portable 
Document Format for people with a disability,"
concluded that if PDF was used, accessible alternative file formats should 
be made available.

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.

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