Enjoy!

Chris French

Acrobat Product Manager

Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader have worked to support Accessibility for many versions. Adobe takes accessibility needs very seriously. Each product team works their own separate issues as product leaders. Adobe also has a corporate Accessibility Product Management team that helps the product teams. I can attest that working with this team has been very helpful. They are very plugged into all things accessibility in the computing world.

The Corporate Accessibility team maintains a section on Adobe.com that provides a wealth of data and user guides.

They just recently updated and published some very helpful documents on a "PDF Accessibility Overview. " The following document topics can be found at this location.

• Creating Accessible PDF from Microsoft® Word
• Acrobat 9 Pro PDF Accessibility Repair Workflow
• Using the Accessibility Checker in Acrobat 9 Pro
• Creating Accessible PDF Forms with Acrobat 9 Pro
• Acrobat 9 Pro Complete Best Practices for Accessibility

I hope to post again about Acrobat and Accessibility. If you have comments about PDF and/or Acrobat related to Accessibility, or questions you might want to see answers to please post a comment.

Cheers

Jeff Moran

Acrobat Product Manager

So I’m sitting on my couch last night with my popcorn and my bunny slippers watching one of TV’s great shows – NBC’s "The Office". And there is the following exchange between Jim and Pam:

Pam: "I’m failing my computer class."

Jim: “I thought you were good at Flash?”

Pam: “I was. But then they switched to Acrobat just as I was learning Quark. I hate computers.”

You can see this clip here. Or, you can watch the entire episode at the NBC web site (the clip is at Minute 8:00).

Now first of all, we need to give NBC a gentle ribbing for possibly blurring the distinctions between three very distinct software applications – Adobe Flash, Adobe Acrobat, and Quark.  To paraphrase what the Twitter crowd was saying after the episode: "Why exactly would a user switch from Quark to Adobe Acrobat and how does that relate to Adobe Flash?"

All kidding aside, there are a lot of users who have audio content, video content and Flash skills and want to utilize all of these resources to create more compelling, more dynamic business content . And Acrobat 9 is an incredible tool to do all of that. With new support in Acrobat 9 and Reader 9 for Adobe Flash, users are able to convert many common video formats (like MOV, AVI, etc) into Flash video (FLV) and then embed that video content onto a PDF page. They’re also able to embed Flash applications (SWF) onto a PDF page. This means that Reader 9 can serve as a universal media player and your recipients will only need the free Adobe Reader to consume your audio or video files.  Read more about the feature set here. And if you haven’t seen it yet, download an incredible sample file illustrating this put together by Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour. Finally, with Acrobat 9′s PDF Portfolios, not only can you bring together many different files and customize the consumption and branding experience using our default Flash-based layouts, but you can also create your own unique Flash layout and customize your PDF Portfolios in any way imaginable.

So you see, Pam? Adobe is working hard to allow you to transition those Flash skills into the Acrobat world. We’re confident that with Acrobat 9, you’ll be able to create rich, interactive business communications which will benefit the fine Dunder Mifflin paper supply company. Now if we could only come up with some features which will help Dwight with his beet farm and Meredith with her love life. Well – software can only do so much.

Have you ever been looking for a single destination to learn about Acrobat features, ask questions, and engage with like-minded Acrobat users? Look no further than our Acrobat Community Help area. JoAnn Davis, the Acrobat lead within our Learning Resources group (the group who writes the exhaustive Acrobat Help File in addition to lots of other content) suggested that we all check out what’s new in the Acrobat Community Help area. More after the break…

Acrobat Community Help is an integrated environment on adobe.com that gives you access to community-generated content moderated by Adobe and industry experts. Comments from users help guide you to an answer. Community Help draws on a number of resources, including:

• Videos, tutorials, tips and techniques, blogs, articles, and examples for designers and developers.
• Complete online product Help, which is updated regularly by the Adobe documentation team.
• Live commenting, moderated by experts in the community.
• All other content on Adobe.com, including knowledgebase articles, downloads and updates, Developer Connection, and more.

Searching Community Help

Acrobat Help includes a custom Google search engine, which lets us index the best sites and resources for Acrobat instructional content. This search index includes our own Adobe Help, support docs, and tutorials as well as content created by the larger community. The goal of the custom search index is to help you to find focused answers faster than with a standard web search.

You have two ways to search Community Help:

• On any page in web help, use the Search field in the upper left to access Community Help directly. To search only Adobe documentation, select the option This Help System Only.
• On the Acrobat Community Help page, use the main search field. The Help and Support page is a portal to all of the Community Help content for your product. To filter a search by Adobe content only, click All Adobe Help And Support on the results page.

The sites searched by the Community Help search engine are hand-selected and reviewed for quality by Adobe and Adobe Community Experts. Adobe experts also work to ensure that the top search results include a mix of different kinds of content, including results from Acrobat web help.

You can also download a PDF of web help by clicking the icon at the top right of the page.

This is a new system. We hope you’ll explore it and let us know what you think. We’re listening to customer feedback and we’re always looking for ways to improve the experience.

JoAnn Davis, Learning Resources – Acrobat

Every year Adobe hosts our MAX conference around the world to bring together developers, designers, educators and partners and to share all things Adobe.  The conferences are being held:

• November 16-19, 2008 – San Francisco
• December 1-4, 2008 – Milan
• January 29-30, 2009 – Tokyo

Acrobat will be well represented at this year’s series of conferences by such Acrobat gurus as Ali Hanyaloglu, Joel Geraci, and Lori Defurio, as well as lots of others. Some of the Acrobat session highlights include:

• A PDF File Can Do That? – Learn how easy it is to build a rich interactive PDF file.
• Acrobat and PDF for the Web Designer – Learn how to get PDF files to behave the way you want on the web.
• Collaboration: Lessons from the Field – Hear how Adobe customers have implemented collaboration solutions.
• I Didn’t Know Acrobat Could Do That! (followed by I Didn’t Know Acrobat Could Do That Too!)
• Inside PDF – Learn surprising details about the inside of a PDF file.
• SWF Playback in Acrobat 9 – Part 1 (Customized PDF Portfolio Layouts) and Part II (ActionScript and Rich Media Annotation)

To learn more, just click on the robot. (His name may be Max. I’m not sure.)