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 …

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.

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.

A simple rule for good web sites: content is golden. In an accessibility context, structured content is golden. It a core responsibility of the site owner to ensure this is followed (not just the developer). When you examine this issue, you can then understand why few organisations will ever produce accessible PDFs.

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.