The Australian Government recently released a study into the Accessibility of the Portable Document Format (PDF) for people with a disability, which Duff Johnson analysed very effectively.

I can agree with almost all of Duff’s points, and it’s covered so well I didn’t feel I needed to check the source …

I.e. Accessible Rich Internet Applications with Flash, Flex & Air. This presentation by Andrew Kirkpatrick took us through some of the technologies available, with a special eye on the accessibility possibilities and things you need to watch out for.

I was writing a little accessibility article for .net magazine about text-replacement techniques, including sIFR. I was blithely saying that “yea, don’t worry, it’s fine” with a couple of caveats. But, rather than rely on memory I did a quick test, and discovered something strange.

The Open Screen Project from Adobe will remove restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specs, and removing the licensing fees. What could the consequences be?

After my initial disappointment with the Office 2007 pluggin for creating PDFs, I’ve had some discussion with the Microsoft team, and a chance to do a bit more testing. This post compares the conversion of a simple Word 2007 document with the Office pluggin, Acrobat 8.1, and OpenOffice.

A friend & colleague of mine has just released the beta version of a new tool. Although everyone (who cares) has probably heard of colour contrast analysers, this does the opposite, and helps you choose accessible colour combinations.
Enter the Colour Contrast Visualiser.

I had previously heard that Office 2007 (or 12 back then) was going to have built in PDF support, with tagging (i.e. accessible output). Not too long ago I installed Vista and Office 2007 on my work machine, but there was no sign of it. Then I found the Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS Add-in for 2007 Microsoft Office.

With all the fuss over AJAX and Flash accessibility you get, I thought it might be worth outlining the process we used to create a Flash/AJAX widget and highlight one of the advantages you get with this method. It also means that the use of Flash has no impact on your Search Engine Optimisation.

In my previous article on responsibilities in accessibility you might have noticed that I’d fallen into the traditional accessibility trap of only really referring to (X)HTML/CSS sites and guidelines. I’m quite aware of other technologies, but it’s worth looking at why other formats are harder to make accessible.

I periodically receive emails from Sitemorse, despite trying to unsubscribe a couple of years ago. This one escaped my usual filters, and I noticed an interesting statistic about the number of accessible PDFs in the wild.