From: Steve Jacobson - IT Marketing Applications
3M Company - 555-01-03 Phone: (612) 733-9780
St. Paul, MN 55144 FAX: (612) 736-6037
After reading the posting covering a government standard for a portable
document format, I felt it might be useful to relate some things that
were discussed at the ICADD meeting during the Closing the Gap
conference. At that meeting, the whole issue of portable documents was
discussed at great length. There have also been some developments since
then that have appeared on the mailing list of the International
Committee on Accessible Document Design (ICADD). We're not going to like
everything about any portable document standard that includes the
capability to include bit-mapped images, since this capability could be
abused. On the other hand, we are not going to keep graphics off the
Internet either.
Several things have happened since this issue first arose that persons
reading the posted document may recognize. First, it turns out that if
the government adopts Adobe's acrobat as a standard, that file format
becomes public. Persons wishing to write viewers for these documents
will be able to get a complete file format definition and will not be
obligated to pay royalties to Adobe. Next, there is specific language
within the requirements that some level of support for braille and
speech synthesis access be provided. Of course, this is not really
defined and in no way guarantees anything, but it is a lever. Thirdly,
the commitment to preserving some elements of the ICADD standard will
help us. Among other things, this may include the provision of text
descriptions of captions to bit-mapped images, and more complete
definitions of tables. There was also a commitment that these elements
will be included in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that is used
within the World Wide Web. It was interesting that there was apparently
some resistance to including labels for table collumns and rows in HTML,
until it was realized that such labeling would facilitate the importing
of tables contained in HTML documents into spreadsheets and databases.
The posted document also include a reference to maintaining the ability
to conduct text searches which will also help us.
There were some other points discussed at the ICADD meeting that are not
apparent in the posted document. On the positive side, there was a
willingness by Adobe to commit resources to develop a DOS text-based
viewer for their product, and to work in other ways to make their format
more accessible. On the negative side, there were those who felt that a
lot of what we are hearing about making portable documents accessible
are fairly empty promises made to get someting adopted.
I think that we need to watch all of this very carefully. If I have
achieved nothing else, it should be clear that this is a complex issue.
Although some document structure will be preserved, it'll only be as
good as the structure placed into a document by an author. A table
created by tabbing instead of using table definition codes won't be
handled well, for example. As long as bit-mapped images can be contained
within a document, there is a risk that some text information will be
preserved as scanned images. We need to try to kill any such trend, but
this isa more general problem than any specific portable document
format.
Others on this list may have other reactions, to the posted document,
but I think we're better off than we were six months ago. That isn't to
say that there are not some significant potential problems.
Regards,
Steve Jacobson
INTERNET: SOJACOBSON@MMM.COM
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