Learning about PDF Accessibility
Introduction
As the internet has grown and developed in recent years, PDF (portable document format) has emerged as one of the most popular formats for placing documents on the World Wide Web. In large part this popularity rests upon the versatility of PDF documents. Adobe Acrobat products allow users to preserve fonts, formatting, colors, and graphics of any document irrespective of the operating platform and the application under which the file was originally created. In addition, many authors and publishers prefer converting materials to PDF for security reasons offered by this format. In addition to populating the World Wide Web, PDF files are used to distribute electronic documents over networks, via e-mail or CD-ROM.
For these reasons, PDF files have become perhaps the most extensively used format for digitizing print-based materials. PDF documents will be an integral part of the Internet for the foreseeable future. With this in mind, learning to create accessible PDF files is a key component to the goal of creating an accessible digital world.
Before the release of the various applications in the Acrobat 5.0 family, PDF files contained no real text, but were merely visual renderings of a page, with no real text underlying the image. In addition to posing a variety of problems for disabled and non-disabled users alike, this made PDF documents impossible for people using screen-reading technologies to access any information contained within a PDF document.
With the release of Acrobat Reader 5.0 in 2001, however, Adobe incorporated several accessibility features into their product, allowing users to read PDF files with screen readers, view documents in high contrast mode, zoom and resize text to fit any size view, and enabled basic keyboard navigation. These developments benefited a large sector of the disabled population. In addition several plug-in and features within the Acrobat Capture Pack made it possible to create accessible documents from scanned pages. Moving print-based data from the hardcopy page into an accessible format via an optical character recognition function is a powerful tool, though a quick and accurate conversion remains dependent upon the clarity and layout of the hardcopy.
Most recently, the release of the suite of applications in the Acrobat 6.0 family has built upon the accessibility features first introduced two years ago with version 5.0. These improvements address both the needs of individuals with a variety of disabilities and providers with an interest in creating accessible documents. For an overview of accessibility features in Acrobat Reader, Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Standard, and Adobe Acrobat Professional, go to the Adobe's overview of Adobe products and accessibility.