Hi Amar I will comment inline in your mail. My comments will be in <HK> on a new line. Harish
-----Original Message----- From: AccessIndia [mailto:accessindia-boun...@accessindia.org.in] On Behalf Of Amar Jain Sent: Sunday, September 8, 2019 5:54 AM To: accessindia@accessindia.org.in Subject: Re: [AI] List down your accessibility issues with PDFs Dear all, At the outset, thank you to everyone for taking their time out to respond to this request. My apologies for getting back with a response with some delay, as there is a lot going on. I am copying people from Adobe on this email, as my intentions are to: (i) get this to their attention that people with blindness are not having accessible experience with their beautiful creation, and (ii) if they get to a point where they stop supporting us, then we need to find someone who can legally compel them to support us to make their PDF accessible. Please see my response to everyone's email below. Also, if I need some information from any specific individual, I have put that as a note: 1. Password protection, scanned PDF, and OCR Issues: The password protection is a business need, as at times clients want the functionality of making the content so confidential that it cannot be copied, extracted, modified, printed, and so on. The real challenge for an assistive technology is that it needs to be able to extract the content in form of the text from the underlying source code for it to be able to pass on in an accessible manner to a person with a disability. The only way you can get around it is to use either a virtual printer, or a normal printer, along with re-scanning the printed material and performing an OCR. Adobe as a business needs to provide this functionality to its clients and getting it out due to it rendering inaccessible content is not possible unless someone can try getting them into legal trouble for discrimination due to disability in U.S. Indian law and Indian courts cannot help us. They should alert authors when they change security settings at a point where security settings prevent reading screen readers. As far as scanned PDFs are concerned, that is the problem of the content creator. Acrobat Pro does provide you the OCR functionality, and it cannot be combined in the Acrobat Reader as it comes with a cost and to keep the business running, companies need to recover the cost. So far as people using stuff like titles, headers, footers, which render inaccurate OCR content, that is again a content creator's problem, and there is nothing that Adobe can do about it. So far, my recommendation in terms of an OCR is to use ABBYY Fine Reader. I have not come across an OCR which is better than that. <hk> I did mention in my mail, all security features like disable printing etc should not be altered for screen readers.They are business requirements and I am not asking to change it. Whenever a screen reader opens the PDF document, the application is aware of it. By maintaining the protection they have still to provide the inputs to the screen reader. This is technically possible so don't be carried out with this argument. Secondly they are free to use open source OCR's like Teserac. They can get bulk licence for a small cost, so you need not go soft on that. We need to press our requirements To supplement, it has a speech aloud function to speak out content. This would be required to make it a fully accessible solution. [Note to Bhavani sir: Re the issue of PDF opening in older version and not opening in the newer version, If the contents of the PDF are not confidential, then please share on an email, and let's try to get Adobe's attention. Although, it is not an accessibility issue, but rather a compatibility issue.] 2. Reading non-Unicode PDF files: Reading Hindi and other PDF files which are non-Unicode, with screen readers is a challenge. We need to reach out to people who have created these fonts to identify the solution. Adobe is only allowing authors to create the content in the way they want. As a result, the only functionality which Adobe can provide is to be able to render the font in PDF. There are Unicode converters available, both free and paid. See if that can help you out. Additionally, I will still try my luck with Adobe to see if we can find out a solution which renders such fonts in a way which can be read out by screen readers. But I must confess, my knowledge is severely limited in this area, and I need someone who can educate me in this area to come to a solution. The only thing which I understand at this point is that why does the same file is capable of being read by a screen reader and why PDF cannot render the same functionality. <hk> Amar Acrobat reader is not Unicode compliant. Once they fix it all the Indian Unicode text will be spoken. I don't expect them to fix non Unicode font issue. If anyone can send me a sample, that would be of big help. [Note to Sandeep and Rohit bhaiya: I have addressed your problems.] 3. Reading tables and complex material in PDFs: This is one major problem of PDFs. Adobe wants authors to tag stuff properly, which of course is bit difficult, as you cannot make everyone aware on the need to be accessible. We need to get to a solution which does not incur additional cost of buying Acrobat Pro just to be able to do tagging in documents. <HK> We are talking about making a wholistic accessible solutions. Let us not be carried with their technical challenges These can be fixed if there is a willingness to work on that. 4. Font compression which makes screen readers to read as if there is no spaces between words: This is again a functionality, which Adobe provides to reduce the size of the file. While people who can see, will see the material as it is on screen with proper spaces, but being blind is our problem not really Adobe's. Which is why screen reader does not read the PDFs which are reduced in fonts. The only solution I can suggest is to use OCR. Otherwise buy Acrobat Pro to be able to use fully featured fonts. Adobe will not stop providing this functionality again, unless U.S. laws and U.S. lawyers support us. <hk. Again Amar you are getting muddled with their technical issues. If the words are getting joined then it is certainly their problem. Who else will fix it? Compression does not mean you take out the spaces between words.During uncompression you get back the original content. It is not using the visual element to do so. 5. Unable to use find feature, comments, and jumping by screen readers. These are exact problems which Adobe has no option but to fix apart from jumping by screen readers as that is really a Jaws problem, and Vispero will come out with a fix for it. <hk> When there is text,the same can be reached there. Actually the visual content is not syncronised with the text which is made available to screen reader. Again we should bring forth our concerns and not be bogged with their technical issues. Let them deal with it and let us not fall shy in bringing to table our concerns. [Note to Ajay: Can you share a document which has sticky notes, highlighted text, and comments just to prove to Adobe that these are not readable by screen readers?] 6. Feature requests: Adobe should allow us to save files in RTF format, to preserve formatting. Form filling in Adobe at the moment is not accessible with Acrobat Reader, and I do not have the license of Acrobat Pro, so I cannot comment if forms can be accessibly filled using Acrobat Pro. Happy to hear others. We should be able to select tables for us to be able to paste. In general, copy pasting from PDF to any document is not a good experience, as it results into loss of formatting completely. My recommendation is to convert the file in Word and then do copy pasting. <hk>Please tell them our concerns. We will continue to do our "jugad". Nothing stops us <smile>. [Note to Harish sir: Arbitrary string concatenation issue should be addressed-please educate me.] <hk> it is regarding spaces between words getting eaten up arbitrarrorily. Thank you guys and I will do everything possible to get things fixed. If someone has friendly terms with Kiran, then try understanding from him a bit more about Adobe, to see how we can get them to work. He knows me, but getting his time and attention and the real insides only a close friend would be able to do, if he is willing to help. Regards, Amar Jain -----Original Message----- From: Amar Jain <amarj...@amarjain.com> Sent: Thursday, September 5, 2019 7:56 AM To: accessindia@accessindia.org.in Subject: List down your accessibility issues with PDFs Hi all, Considering the pain of blind professionals and students, some of us have decided to work with Adobe and Vispero to find out ways in which PDFs can be made better for people with blindness. And I am doing everything possible to get this to Shantanu’s (CEO of Adobe) attention, so that the bottlenecks between business, legal, compliance and development can be adressed. The good thing is that the head of accessibility at Adobe and Vispero have been very receptive. While the major problem of inaccessibility of PDF is because a lot of things are dependent on authors for ensuring accessibility, but this approach itself needs a relook. Changing millions of minds is difficult, but creating ways to empower millions is certainly possible and the technologies meant to assist people with disabilities is a real example of this. Please send me the list of issues, steps to reproduce, and possible solutions (if any) on: amarj...@amarjain.com With hopes for a more accessible Adobe tomorrow, Amar Jain Sent from my iPhone Search for old postings at: http://www.mail-archive.noclick_com/accessindia@accessindia.org.in/ To unsubscribe send a message to accessindia-requ...@accessindia.org.in with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.noclick_in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in Disclaimer: 1. Contents of the mails, factual, or otherwise, reflect the thinking of the person sending the mail and AI in no way relates itself to its veracity; 2. 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