Re: PDF/UA Support

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 10/20/2015 5:11 AM, Alan BRASLAU wrote:

> My understanding of PDF/UA is a very valid requirement to make texts
> accessible through standard tools, in particular but not limited to
> users having visual deficiencies, for example. This is the reason, not
> hype, behind the US government pushing this standard.

Sure, I understand that, but from what I've seen as demos I'm far from 
convinced. If indeed that is the reason, then a better 'demand' would be 
to provide several versions of the pdf (if rendering i.e. placement on 
the page is important), for instance: b/w : for colorblind, large size 
fonts, less fancy layouts etc .. in fact that would be an easy 
requirement to meet.

The strange thing is that this tagged pdf standard does not have 
provision to embed the whole source (in xml) and point to nodes, which 
would be much more interesting (but not for publishers of course).

It just puzzles me why solutions for problems need to be complex. Or to 
put it otherwise: if I had a disability I would consider this solution a 
crappy poor mans one, not a real one.

> Alternative rendering (via web browsers, for example) will remain
> inferior for most uses as it will not benefit from much of what the TeX
> engine can produce, so this cannot really be the motivation.

It depends, providing an html file alongside even if it looks worse is 
still better than some synthetic voice trying to make something of the 
semi-structured content. In fact, I can imagine serious documents to 
have proper audio embedded, done in a way that does justice to the problem.

Anyway ... we do support it, but on your bsd system: what viewer do you 
use that supports it? We have tags for years and can't even test it 
properly (ok, that has been the same for more pdf stuff).

> For reasons of Universal Accessibility, it would be a good idea for
> ConTeXt to indeed activate tagging by default. The argument of runtime
> and filesize (when proofing and in automatic workflows) is somewhat
> weak for one can ALWAYS deactivate this tagging for such cases. May I
> suggest that Hans reconsider his stand on this issue for the sake of
> promotion of ConTeXt as a very advanced typesetting tool.

our main own application of context is relative fast processing of 
complex xml document and tagging is adding a lot of overhead

interesting is btw that pdf has all kind of compression and that has not 
always influenced its design in a positive way, but with tagging the 
file can become many times larger which is no fun (esp when one produces 
huge pdf's then need to go over the web)

there are not many cases where in context we changed the default and 
it's generally a bad idea as then one needs to go over all workflows and 
en/disable things

of course the user can easily enable it on his system: just drop a 
cont-loc.mkiv file in your texmf-local/tex/context/user path and enable 
it there

Hans

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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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