Australian Government gives PDF thumbs down

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by Steven Lake

PDF is an international standard, so they'll be hard pressed to move away from it since everyone else will demand it. Personally, I think that whoever is making this recommendation is being paid (aka bribed) by a major software company (I can give you three guess who, but you'll probably get it on the first try) to get away from open source standards and towards someone's closed, vendor locked, proprietary standard so that they can rake in the bucks.

Can I take you up on that bet? Please?

The only recommendation is that "if PDF was used, accessible alternative file formats should be made available." PDF is, itself, a proprietary format, and PDF documents are rarely created using all of the accessibility tools available in Adobe Acrobat. The report referred to in the article linked in the OP was commissioned to assess the accessibility of PDFs for those with disabilities - in particular, for those with sight impairment. The conclusions in the report are as follows:

The findings of the Study raise the need for:

• An updated position on the use of PDF files on government websites; including a review of the use of PDF files when the PDF/UA standard is released and Sufficient Techniques become available to satisfy WCAG 2.0 conformance;
• An internationally-agreed position on the characteristics a PDF file must have for optimal accessibility and a transparent indication of the time and skill required to create such files;
• A study into the impact (cost and resource implications) in creating accessible PDF files;
• Better resources and tools to support people in the creation of accessible PDF files, including clear and centralised guidance for government agencies on:
  • appropriate use of the Portable Document Format;
  • how to optimise PDF files for greater accessibility;
  • the importance of testing PDF files for accessibility;
• Education programs, for authors and publishers of government documents, that include:
  • the impact of inaccessible web content on people with a disability;
  • information about assistive technologies and how they are used;
  • advice on how to author documents for online publication; and
• Government agencies to:
  • examine their use of PDF documents;
  • examine their workflow process in the creation of PDF files;
  • continue to offer a choice of file formats.

Nowhere is there any recommendation to dump PDF in favour of some other, equally proprietary, format.

I've worked with the guys at Vision Australia, the organisation commissioned by the Australian government to carry out the end-user consultations that form a large part of the report, and they have, for many years, campaigned and worked to gain greater acceptance of the need for accessibility on the Web and in digital information generally, and they are in no-one's pocket, I can assure you.

- Donna

[sabredog]

At work we use PDF for almost all our documents now. Even engineering drawings sent to our Operations division are A1 PDF, plotted straight from AutoCAD Civil 3D.

Cannot see that changing in the near future.

Not having to send repeated instructions to junior staff to print another plan set or single copy has been great.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by DMSmillie

....
The only recommendation is that "if PDF was used, accessible alternative file formats should be made available." PDF is, itself, a proprietary format,...

I've worked with the guys at Vision Australia, the organisation commissioned by the Australian government to carry out the end-user consultations that form a large part of the report, ...

It is NOT true that PDF is a proprietary format.

PDF is an OPEN STANDARD.

The "guys at Vision Australia" are either incompetent, or trying to justify their existence and fees, by making meaningless recommendations like this.

PDF provides many valuable attributes which no other common format currently provides, including EPUB. This may well change some time in the future, but right now, the Australian taxpayers got suckered.

[sabredog]

Perhaps so. But, without "read-aloud" capability, PDF use would be restricted to those without acute visual difficulties.

Accessibility is a very important issue.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by sabredog

Perhaps so. But, without "read-aloud" capability, PDF use would be restricted to those without acute visual difficulties.

Accessibility is a very important issue.

Adobe Reader has been capable of text to speech for years, since Adobe Reader 5, for free (Adobe just introduced Adobe Reader 10).

See for example Tip of the Week: Adobe Reader’s ‘Read Aloud’ Feature.

[sabredog]

Not every company or organisation uses Adobe though

Providing for sight disabled people in this country is very important and this is the main thrust of the report;

As such, from the summary of the report;

"Overall, the Study found that there is insufficient evidence to establish that the development of the Portable Document Format and improvements in assistive technologies have advanced enough for PDF files to be considered accessible for people with a disability, particularly for those who are blind or have low vision.

Importantly, the Study also highlighted that the issues contributing to the inaccessibility of PDF files, when used with assistive technologies, are not in general directly attributable to the Portable Document Format itself. The issues that result in an inaccessible PDF file are, in order of impact:

the design of the PDF file by the document author to incorporate the correct presentation, structure, tags and elements that maximise accessibility;
the technical ability of the assistive technology to interact with the PDF file (via the relevant PDF Reader); andthe skill of the user and their familiarity with using their assistive technology to interact with a PDF file."

I am not against PDF as we use it at work on a daily basis, as I posted earlier. As document formats go it is pretty much the standard. I do not consider it an ebook format however.

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by Sonist

It is NOT true that PDF is a proprietary format.

PDF is an OPEN STANDARD.

The "guys at Vision Australia" are either incompetent, or trying to justify their existence and fees, by making meaningless recommendations like this.

PDF provides many valuable attributes which no other common format currently provides, including EPUB. This may well change some time in the future, but right now, the Australian taxpayers got suckered.

Excuse me - look at where the quotemarks were in my post - the statement "PDF is a proprietary format" was mine, not theirs. Have you ever watched / listened to a blind person, or someone with severe sight impairment, accessing (or trying to access) a PDF? If you had, you'd understand why it's regarded as a problem.

Blind PC users (and those with other disabilities) have a range of sophisticated software and hardware available which makes it possible for them to use a PC, surf the Web, create and read documents, etc. But most PDFs aren't constructed in a way that will enable that software to read out the content in a meaningful way, or to navigate around the document sensibly. Hence the recommendations to provide information in additional, more accessible formats, and provide training for staff who create PDF documents so they know how to create more accessible PDFs.

Why you think those are "meaningless recommendation" beats me. The report is talking about government/local authority documents being produced for public consumption. You don't think government has a responsibility to produce information in an accessible format?

- Donna

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Adobe Reader has been capable of text to speech for years, since Adobe Reader 5, for free (Adobe just introduced Adobe Reader 10).

See for example Tip of the Week: Adobe Reader’s ‘Read Aloud’ Feature.

Indeed. However it still relies on the PDF having been constructed in a way that results in meaningful information being read out. If it's a series of whole page images, there won't be anything to read out. If it's been cobbled together in a DTP package, you can sometimes end up listening to the page contents being read out in a completely illogical order - paragraph 5, followed by an image caption, followed by the page heading, followed by paragraph 2, etc.

- Donna

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by DMSmillie

Indeed. However it still relies on the PDF having been constructed in a way that results in meaningful information being read out. If it's a series of whole page images, there won't be anything to read out. If it's been cobbled together in a DTP package, you can sometimes end up listening to the page contents being read out in a completely illogical order - paragraph 5, followed by an image caption, followed by the page heading, followed by paragraph 2, etc.

- Donna

Hm, now that we agree that PDF is an open format, the problem is DTP formatting, or image scans?

How is this a uniquely PDF problem? One can import a non-OCR-ed image of a text page into a .doc, or a PlainText document, and it will be equally unreadable by text-to-speech.

Why do you blame PDFs for the shortcomings of the "sophisticated" (read "very expensive and government subsidized") software and hardware, which cannot do what a free reader can do?

As to "DTP packages" (I am assuming you mean a more complex, visual layout), I doubt it is a large problem for government documents, which generally look like ..., well, government documents.

And as a policy matter, it is hardly wiser to strip publications which rely on visual appeal of their design attributes, so that blind people can easily listen to them, than it is to ban radio, because deaf people can't hear it....

The bottom line is that the title of this thread is totally inaccurate.

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by Sonist

The bottom line is that the title of this thread is totally inaccurate.

You might want to take that up with itnews.com.au then.

Government and local government are required by law here to maintain full records of day to day correspondence. The time limitation can be as much as 100 years in some cases.

Digitisation of such correspondence has made storage easier but added a raft of issues of which solutions are less than satisfactory. Coupled with expensive legacy business systems that are specifically tailored for government/local government organisations, it is a very, very big headache for these organisations.

I work for a local government so I know first hand how difficult document compatibility and storage is within the organisation (we use Dataworks - custom software). Once you start adding disabled accessibility to the mix, the whole problem gets even bigger.

PDF files may well make my workday easier, but PDF document downloads online from government services will continue to be an issue for sight disabled users for some time yet. There is no easy resolution here.

[DMSmillie]

Originally Posted by Sonist

How is this a uniquely PDF problem? One can import a non-OCR-ed image of a text page into a .doc, or a PlainText document, and it will be equally unreadable by text-to-speech.

It's not exactly unique to PDF documents, but PDFs are the most commonly encountered accessibility problem on government websites, which is why they felt the need to review the situation with specific regard to PDFs. And if you take a random sample of 100 PDFs and 100 Word docs from government websites, I can pretty well guarantee that you'll find very very few (if any) Word docs consisting of scanned, non-OCR'ed images, and a fair number of PDFs which are impossible to access except by being able to view them, visually.

Originally Posted by Sonist

Why do you blame PDFs for the shortcomings of the "sophisticated" (read "very expensive and government subsidized") software and hardware, which cannot do what a free reader can do?

Assistive technology is sometimes expensive, sometimes not, is rarely government subsidized, and you seem to think that all a blind person needs is to have stuff read out. That's pretty well all Adobe reader and other free readers do. Assistive software does far more than that, and when it's unable to access a PDF, nor will a free reader be able to do so.

Originally Posted by Sonist

As to "DTP packages" (I am assuming you mean a more complex, visual layout), I doubt it is a large problem for government documents, which generally look like ..., well, government documents.

There are loads of newsletters, fact sheets, department annual reports, etc, which are produced within local and central government using Acrobat, InDesign and other DTP packages, but without appropriate training for staff, they're produced with little regard for accessibility.

/Edit to add/
No, I don't mean "a more complex, visual layout". I mean created in a manner which results in individual elements on the page being positioned independently of each other (individual paragraphs, headings, sub-headings, image captions, etc), but not tagged correctly to indicate the semantic structure of the page and the correct reading order, and not properly reflowable. One could create two visually identical PDFs, one accessible and the other not. "Accessible" doesn't equal "text only", "dull", "boring", "lacking visual appeal" or any of the other similar things you might have been led to believe it means. Just as with web design, it revolves around semantic structure, sensible reading order, and text alternatives for images which are only displayed or read out as required.
/end of edit/

Originally Posted by Sonist

And as a policy matter, it is hardly wiser to strip publications which rely on visual appeal of their design attributes, so that blind people can easily listen to them, than it is to ban radio, because deaf people can't hear it....

You keep making statements about the report that are simply not true. Where is there ANY reference in it to stripping publications of their design attributes?!!!

It's clear you believe those with disabilities should stay at home and not expect to be able to do anything ever again if it involves any change on anyone else's part. I refuse to believe that's what the world should or needs to be like. You're determined to believe this is just some sort of scam on the part of the Australian government and Vision Australia, and nothing I or anyone else says is going to change your mind on that. So I'm going to bow out of this discussion here, because if I don't, I'm going to get so bloody angry I'll end up saying something I regret.

- Donna

[Sonist]

[QUOTE=DMSmillie;1250122...
It's clear you believe those with disabilities should stay at home and not expect to be able to do anything ever again if it involves any change on anyone else's part....[/QUOTE]

Wow! You need to calm down. There is no need to make it personal -- you know very little about me or my beliefs.

All I did is point out that your assertion about PDF being a proprietary format is incorrect, and that the title of this thread is misleading, since it implies that the Australian government is rejecting PDF as a format. Instead, from my cursory reading of it, it seems that there is a recommendation for training government employees about how to prepare PDFs (I wonder what group will be providing such training?) It appears to be an overlong report suggesting a few common-sense approaches which probably should have been readily apparent to anyone but a bureaucrat.

In addition, I was merely suggesting that as in most such cases, there are opportunity costs and common sense needs to apply. Otherwise we end up with examples like San Francisco, which failed to introduce much needed washable public toilets, because disability groups insisted that ALL such facilities were wheelchair-accessible, which was a logistical impossibility.

Cheers.

[sabredog]

Originally Posted by Sonist

Otherwise we end up with examples like San Francisco, which failed to introduce much needed washable public toilets, because disability groups insisted that ALL such facilities were wheelchair-accessible, which was a logistical impossibility.

There have been standard requirements for wheelchair accessibility for public facilities for over a decade here. This requirement has been extended over that time to encompass other public facilities and infrastructure.

[Sonist]

Originally Posted by sabredog

There have been standard requirements for wheelchair accessibility for public facilities for over a decade here. This requirement has been extended over that time to encompass other public facilities and infrastructure.

Well, the requirements in the US have been around for a bit longer than a decade, which is generally a good thing. But sometimes reason and common sense should prevail over bureaucratic absolutism.

The San Fransisco washable toilets fiasco was a good illustration how the road to the bathroom can be blocked by good intentions.

Come to think about it, it's impossible to find public bathrooms in Australia, too....

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by sabredog

Not every company or organisation uses Adobe though

With respect, if Adobe does what it advertises, and is accessible, a company has no excuse for not using it if they want/need accessibility. Most organizations that use third-party systems instead of Adobe did it to specifically to save money. Well... you get what you pay for.

Originally Posted by sabredog

I am not against PDF as we use it at work on a daily basis, as I posted earlier. As document formats go it is pretty much the standard. I do not consider it an ebook format however.

That's a personal position. PDF is a viable ebook format. It serves up text and images in a digital format, capable of being read on dedicated and non-dedicated devices, and being manipulated for ease of use. Ebook formats don't need to do any more or less than that.

The fact that you "don't consider it" an ebook format does not mean it's not a viable ebook format, any more than my not preferring Mobipocket means that Kindle should not be considered an ebook format.