MEMORANDUM
To: Members And Friends
NFB R&D Committee
From: T. V. Cranmer, Chairman
Subject: Access to the National Information Highway documents
Date:
March 31, 1994
The excerpt from a message from T V Raman, see below, explains the
problem. Raman is mentioned in the January issue of the Braille
Monitor--in my piece to the International Conference on Technology.
He is a guy on the move, and we need to put our NFB muscle to work
on the problem he describes. Here is his message, without the
reprint from NEWSBYTES. If you want that, let me know.
Begin Raman:
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Date: Wed, 30 Mar 1994 22:12:57 -0500
From: raman@crl.dec.com
Message-Id: <9403310312.AA27018@aster.crl.dec.com>
To: tvcran01@starbase.spd.louisville.edu
Cc: raman@crl.dec.com
Subject: **Important** Please read;
Hi Tim,
We have talked in the past in the context of my work on electronic
documents.
I would like to bring to your attention a matter of grave concern.
We all know the drastic negative impact that people with visual
impairments
suffered due to the inadequateness of the hooks in the GUI
necessary to
provide equal access. Well, we're now faced by an even bigger
threat which is
likely to completely outshadow the negative consequences of the
GUI.
I'm refering to what probably qualifies as the biggest pot-hole on
the much
touted national information highway, namely, the capture and
dissemination of
federal information and forms in inaccessible formats.
The federal government is currently in the process of converting
public
documents to a form in which they can be served on the NIH. Their
format of
choice is currently PDF, (Portable Document Format) designed by
Adobe for
their Acrobat series of products.
Let me explain in a few lines why PDF is inaccessible and likely to
remain
so:
PDF== Portable Description Format is better described as a page
description
format. It was designed to solve a specific problem: namely to
permit
document
interchange between disparate computing platforms. I.E. person A
prepares a
document under MSWord on a PC and wishes to share it with someone
using a
Mac.
The Acrobat series of products allow a user to do this by storing
the
document
in PDF, and providing viewers for PDF files for the various
platforms.
Since it was implicitly assumed that the documents would be viewed
on a
visual
display, the PDF format does not capture any structural
information, it only
captures the visual appearance of a document.
This is where those of us with different needs/abilities get hit.
Exchanging
PDF files is only a level above exchanging pieces of paper: we're
now
exchanging bits of electronic paper.
The information on the paper is accessible only to someone who can
see it.
This trend has been underway for about six-eight months now, and I
have
written to a number of people in Washington without any effect.
Things are happening even as we speak, and the IRS has already
started
distributing tax forms in PDF. They started this as an experiment
a few weeks
ago on the internet, and today, the availability of these forms on
Compuserv
was announced.
So next year, people who can see will be able to do their taxes
online using
the official forms: everyone else will be left by the wayside.
The justification that has been presented to the various agencies
by the
proponents of PDF is the following: "We will provide viewers for
Dos and this
will make PDF documents accessible." Further, they also assert that
since PDF
documents can be displayed under Windows and since screen-reading
programs
exist for Windows, the problem is solved.
The above is just a case of pulling the wool over people's eyes
combined with
a gross misunderstanding of what accessibility means.
In order for us to be able to use online information effectively,
and develop
methods that provide flexible access to documents using Braille and
speech,
we
need more than the letters and symbols that appear on a piece of
paper: we
need to have a handle on the structure of the information.
To give some intuition: Given a tax form, just knowing the
characters on the
form is insufficient: you need to know which are check boxes, where
one needs
to fill an entry etc.
This message is getting rather long, so I'll sign off and wait till
I hear
from you.
You can reply either by email, or preferable call me at 1 617 621
6637
At the end of this message, I am appending an article describing
the IRS
online tax forms.
Hoping to hear from you soon,
--Raman
END RAMAN
The NEWSBYTES article, deleted, describes the IRS forms
distribution through CompuServe.
Tim Cranmer
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