Adobe® Acrobat® Documents
Alternatives to Adobe® Acrobat® Documents
The question: If there isn't the technology to create accessible HTML from PDF documents, then is Standard 14 asking for something that can't be delivered?
Best Practice Suggestions: The key question is: What was the native format of this document? If the native format was a Word or WordPerfect document, then there are alternatives, and that's all the policy is requiring — that the posting organization provide alternatives for content formats that may exclude a portion of their audience. Posting PDF files alone is no different than posting a narrated video clip and refusing to caption it.
Without acceptable conversion tools for some PDFs, making them compliant may constitute "undue burden." Consider some of the old genealogical documents in the Health Department or in the State Library that were scanned as images and subsequently put into PDF documents. In the absence of alternative resources (e.g., staff to transcribe the documents, software to perform OCR on handwritten documents), making those tens of thousands of images into readable text would probably constitute an bona fide undue burden mdash; and in fact, may change the fundamental experience of accessing those documents in the first place (i.e., the ability to see your ancestor's actual handwriting).
However, for Microsoft® Word® documents that are converted to and posted as PDF documents, the original still exists and could easily either be saved as plain text (an acceptable option for a text-only document) or converted with minimal effort to HTML. The attraction of PDF in this example is that creating a PDF is as easy for the document creator as printing a document to the Adobe Distiller and posting a link to it, versus having to put that minimal effort into converting it into HTML.
A third case exists in those documents whose ultimate form will be hard copy. The example I use here is the Workers' Compensation Board. It's written into law that their forms must be submitted as hard copy. They post the forms as PDF so that their customers can download, print and fill them in. For those who are print-impaired, we counseled the Board to list the name of the form, its purpose, and what information would be required to complete it, along with a telephone number for a Board staff person who could help the customer fill it in. We believe this constitutes a best practice for forms whose ultimate use will be as a piece of hard copy.
Back to Section Table of Contents
Back to Curriculum Table of Contents