Leonard Rosenthol <[email protected]> wrote: >Accessibility was one of the two reason that the original structured PDF >advanced to tagged PDF - in that the tags are communicated directly to a >screen readers (such as Jaws or WindowEyez on Windows). The >forthcoming PDF/UA standard is making great advances in this area for >both ISO 32000-2 as well as their own.
Thank you for the reference to PDF/UA, of which I wasn't aware. It is very likely that accessibility was also one of the motivations for the original introduction of support for logical document structures into PDF 1.4. In fact, if my memory is correct, Adobe announced an intention to add such a feature as part of their accessibility strategy prior to its inclusion in products and in the PDF specification. To their credit, they also employed several highly talented and accomplished experts to work on accessibility and associated areas of development. It is pleasing to note that the results of this work, in so far as they affected the PDF specification, were incorporated into the ISO 32000 standard in sections 14.7-14.9.
