PDF Compliance

As the Internet has grown and developed in recent years, PDF (portable document format) has emerged as one of the most popular formats for posting documents to the World Wide Web. In large part this popularity rests upon the versatility of PDF documents. Fonts, formatting, colors, and graphics of any source document can be preserved in a PDF document irrespective of the operating platform and the application under which the file originally was created. In addition, many authors and publishers prefer converting materials to PDF for the security protections offered by this format. Unlike traditional documents that are read and produced by word processors, PDF files are loaded and viewed one page at a time. In other words, your computer loads each page individually, instead of the entire document as in traditional word processing programs.

For these reasons, PDF files have become perhaps the most extensively used formats for digitizing print-based materials. Like it or not, PDF documents will be an integral part of the Internet for the foreseeable future. With this in mind, learning to create accessible PDF files is a key component to the project of creating an accessible digital world.

Before the release of the various applications in the Acrobat 5.0 family, PDF files contained no real text, but were merely graphical renderings of a page. In addition to posing a variety of problems for disabled and non-disabled users alike, this made PDF documents impossible for people using screen-reading technologies to access any of the information contained within a PDF document. With the release of Acrobat Reader 5.0 in 2001, however, Adobe incorporated several accessibility features into their product, allowing users to read PDF files with screen readers, view documents in high contrast mode, zoom and resize text to fit any size view, and enabled basic keyboard navigation. These developments benefited a large sector of the disabled population. In addition several plug-in and features within the Acrobat Capture Pack made it possible to create accessible documents from scanned images. Moving print-based data from the hardcopy page into an accessible format via an optical character recognition function is a powerful tool, though a quick and accurate conversion remains dependent upon the clarity and layout of the hardcopy.

With the advent of Acrobat Reader 6.0 (full version), Adobe has embedded a "screen reader" of sorts into the Reader software itself. This scaled-down version of a screen reader (more accurately referred to as a "text-to-speech synthesizer" in this instance) can read aloud the text in nearly all PDF files, even older files that were not created with accessibility in mind.

What you will need to do to make your PDF document accessible will be determined by the source of your document.

NetE will help you in making your PDF documents accessible by:

• Logically structuring PDF documents
• Converting a MS WORD Document into a PDF file
• Providing necessary tags