From: Steve Jacobson - IT Marketing Applications
3M Company - 555-01-03 Phone: (612) 733-9780
St. Paul, MN 55144 FAX: (612) 736-6037
A draft report to NIST containing recommendations for a final form
portable document delivery format appeared on the UACCESS-L list from
the Trace Research Center. The report was written by a blue ribbon panel
created for that purpose. Since I don't know how many people have
already seen this and because it is fairly long, I am including only a
small portion that deals with accessibility of documents. If you do not
subscribe to the UACCESS-L list and want to read the entire report,
write to me at sojacobson@mmm.com and I can route a copy to you.
As I read the report, it appears that the portable document delivery
format PDDF standard being recommended as a starting point is Adobe
Acrobat's PDF. I say "starting point" since the government standard
could evolve independently in the future, and there are still some
copyright and patent issues that would need clarification.
To get a truly complete picture, the report should be read in its
entirity, but here are paragraphs dealing with accessibility issues.
-------------- Extracted from Report ---------------------
12. Accessibility of Text, for Copying or Extracting or for Indexing
(with some
level of formatting information) - The textual information contained
within a
final form document should be accessible both to extract the text
(with as much
information about its format as possible) and to index text using a
full text indexing technology. The format should allow for conversion to
Braille
encoding or voice synthesis appropriate to meet requirements under the
accommodation law for accessibility to persons with disabilities. The
format should allow for textual description of graphical elements (e.g.,
a 2x3
photograph in the top right corner of the page of a French Poodle
standing up). 13. Capture Structure - In addition to the presentation,
the PDDF should be
able to represent structural information, such as paragraph markers,
article
threading, the flow of connected sections of text, subject indexes,
and
information in a table of contents. The PDDF should also support
imbedding of data such as EDI, SGML or HTML, access to persons with
disabilities by using
the ICADD DTD (ISO 12083). 14. Support Navigation Aids to Directly
Access Segments of a Document - The
PDDF should include navigation aids such as a Table of Contents, with
hyperlinks to named segments or viewing rectangles on pages of the
document.
The format should additionally allow for embedded textual and
graphical
hyperlinks, links to any place within a document via identified
hyperlink
destination points.
-------------- End of Extract -----------------
Since the above are recommendations and also do not contain specific
approaches to Adobe Acrobat, it is difficult to predict what impact they
will have. I am glad that such statements are in the recommendations,
but we'll have to continue monitoring whatever progress is made.
Regards,
Steve Jacobson
INTERNET: SOJACOBSON@MMM.COM
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