Adobe has worked on accessibility standards committees in the U.S. and internationally, including: the W3C's WCAG 2.0, ATAG 2.0, Timed Text/DFXP, HTML5, and Protocols and Formats working groups; the U.S. Access Board's TEITAC subcommittee; and the PDF Universal Accessibility work group at AIIM. Two important goals of our participation are to help ensure that accessibility standards are effective at meeting the needs of those with disabilities and to promote technological neutrality. From an accessibility perspective, we believe that developers should be able to use any technology as long as they are able to deliver content that meets accessibility standards and end-user needs.

Adobe Flash and PDF (which is now an ISO standard - ISO 32000-1) both provide support for accessibility, but it is important for authors and developers to learn best practices and understand user needs in order to deliver results that take advantage of the unique capabilities of the formats and that allow all users to access the information and functionality. Authors sometimes will make a trade-off between producing a visually interesting application in a timely fashion and adhering to accessibility requirements. Other times, accessibility gets left to be dealt with at the end of a project that has a firm end-date and when other features take longer than expected, accessibility or other items fall off the schedule. Government agencies don't get to make these trade-offs as they are bound by law to make their services accessible, but commercial entities don't have the same requirements and often overlook the needs of people with disabilities when creating web experiences and documents.

Despite our best intentions, Adobe overlooked the needs of people with disabilities in our recently-launched Open Government web site, which failed to meet certain accessibility best practices. Some customers have contacted us and a few bloggers pointed out the issues and we are working to improve the Open Government site. We apologize to everyone who attempted to access the site and was unable to do so. With the benefit now of seeing the site in its present state rather than the initially-planned more dynamic and interactive version, the team is recreating the site using a combination of HTML and Flash. Several improvements to the current Flash-based site have been addressed already. My hope for this post and the intention of the Open Government site is to help other developers learn from this example, and improve their own development practices of visually rich web sites for access by all users.

Whether users need to use assistive technologies such as screen readers or magnifiers, operate their computer with the keyboard alone, view larger text sizes, view captions or subtitles for audio information, or utilize many other accessibility features, these features already exist in Adobe products. And while these are not perfect in all products yet, we are dedicated to enabling our tools to handle accessibility in robust and reliable ways.

If you are interested in learning more about accessibility in Adobe products, I'm providing some interesting links below. As always, we value the feedback of our customers and end users, so let us know your thoughts.

For more information about PDF accessibility:

• http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat
• http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/reader

For more information about Flash accessibility:

• http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash

PDF and Flash accessibility training resources:

• http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/tutorials.html
• http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/best_practices.html

Adobe accessibility compliance statements:

• http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/compliance/

• An overview of accessible electronic document design considerations
• Best practice techniques for authoring accessible PDF files using Adobe InDesign CS4
• Where to find more resources and information

Sign up at http://www.adobegovernmentevents.com/AccessibleContentWorkflow/invite.html

The session will be available for viewing later, and it will be captioned for deaf and hard-of-hearing users.

If anyone is having this problem, please let me know by commenting but when you comment please provide any information that you think might be relevant, such as the operating system and version, version of Adobe Reader, any assistive technology you are using, and what steps you take to get the message and to try to find the accept button.

If you'd prefer to not share this information in the public comments, just add a comment asking to be contacted and I'll send an email address to send info to. Thanks.

All users encounter Flash-based content and PDF documents regularly, and Adobe wants NVDA users to have a positive experience. Therefore, Adobe is funding NVAccess to help address the goals to "Improve support for Adobe Reader" and "Add support for Adobe Flash embedded in Browsers. This work will benefit not only Flash and PDF, but also help users access content and applications developed with Adobe Flex and interactive forms developed with Adobe LiveCycle.

NVDA developers have already done some work to enhance access to PDF in the current release. We're looking forward to additional improvements progress that will surely be made in the coming months!

Take a look and please vote for Matt's talk - it will be very interesting!

You can view the tutorial at http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/flash/tutorial/.

If you prefer in-person training, you should check out Knowbility's Access U Conference, which just took place in May, but is worth watching out for in the future also since Knowbility runs training events regularly.

The document is located at http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/pdfs/accessibledocswithindesignCS4.pdf but you might also be interested in the InDesign product accessibility page for additional information.

Please pass on any comments.

• to harmonise and facilitate the public procurement of accessible ICT products and services by identifying a set of functional European accessibility requirements for public procurement of products and services in the ICT domain, and
• · to provide a mechanism through which the public procurers have access to an electronic toolkit, enabling them to make use of these harmonised requirements in procurement process.

Adobe participated in an Expert meeting on March 23 in Brussels to discuss WCAG 2.0 implementation and the report of this meeting was recently published. Adobe encourages the European commission to use WCAG 2.0 as the basis for the EU standards, and to do so without modification of the WCAG 2.0 document.

More information on Mandate 376: http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/einclusion/archive/deploy/pubproc/eso-m376/index_en.htm

Give this a try and let us know if it works for you or if you have any suggestions for improvements.

Demonstration test file

Demonstration test file, with HTML links also (added 8/18/2009)

Download demonstration file

Information about how to join the webinar is available at http://www.paciellogroup.com/blog.

The session will be captioned live and offered as an archived session for asynchronous viewing.

Open question - what topics would you like to see covered in future webinars?