Adobe announced Acrobat 9 yesterday, so I want to point out the resources that are available to people interested in accessibility. The Acrobat 9 accessibility page is located at http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat/, and from there you can read the brief overview, find information about what's new in Acrobat 9, and locate the Acrobat FAQ for accessibility.
There is a lot of PDF that is generated though Adobe's PDFMaker plug-in for Microsoft Word. You can quite easily create PDF documents that meet the majority of accessibility needs with very little effort, if you know how. For the CSUN conference, we created a one-page document that helps guide users who may not know much about accessibility so that they can more easily address accessibility in their documents.
This document doesn't cover every possible issue, but identifies the small number of items that need some attention to avoid the most common issues that authors can prevent. In general, if an author:
The results are excellent for most documents created in Word. Yes, you can deviate from this path and need to perform repair work to make a PDF document accessible, but to start I want to ensure that authors know what the path to minimize challenges looks like.
This is a first stab at this document, please let us know what you like, if it is useful to you, or any other comments you may have.
Last week, members of the Adobe accessibility team attended the California State University's "Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference" - aka CSUN. This is a big event in accessibility each year and if you are interested in accessibility you should consider attending in 2009.
Adobe participated in four talks at CSUN:
Please take a look and let us know if you have any comments.
A group of IT and assistive technology companies have formed a group designed to address engineering challenges around accessibility issues. The group's name is the Accessibility Interoperability Alliance, or AIA. Adobe is part of this group because it is important to have improved methods to provide straightforward interoperability between IT products and assistive technology tools.
Of particular interest is the project that seeks to harmonize existing accessibility APIs such as IAccessible2 and UIAutomation. With the wide variety of assistive technologies available today, both these tools and Adobe's players need reliable and standard methods to participate in information exchanges with assistive tools. There are too many tools for Adobe's players to support directly through customization and similarly the assistive technology tools have too many IT products that they need to support so they too cannot provide custom solutions across the board. The way forward is through better and harmonized (or converged) APIs.
The AIA press release is at: http://www.accessinteropalliance.org/newsevents/pr121007.html.
The AIA group web site is http://www.accessinteropalliance.org/.
A new accessibility book hit the shelves last Monday. Web Accessibility: Web Standards and Regulatory Compliance is the collective work of several well-known names in accessibility, including Jim Thatcher. This is the new version of the standard reference "Constructing Accessible Websites" that Jim and others wrote a few years back, so the format and cover image are similar, but with updated and new content.
I wrote chapters on PDF accessibility and an overview of accessible technologies and co-authored/updated the chapter on Flash accessibility with Bob Regan. I'm very happy with the book, and I'm sure you'll find it invaluable.