August 17, 2006 Meeting Minutes

Topic: Making PDF Files 508 Compliant Karen Reshkin and Jeffrey Levy, from EPA, discussed PDF Standards.

Attendees: Approximately 110 people on the call

News

Federal Web Manager Fall Workshop
- Joe Pagano led the Conference Call and reminded participants about the Fall Workshop, Tuesday, September 19, 2006 at Catholic University in Washington, DC.
- Feature keynote speakers are John Lewis Needham of Google on The Future of Search, and usability leader Jared Spool on Scent, Search, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
- For more information and to register, see: Web Manager University Fall Workshop.
Best Practice Awards
The Best Practice Nominations are in the hands of the judges. Voting on the Finalists by Forum members will open on August 24. We will let you know by an E-mail to the Forum when the voting begins.
Fall Semester, Web Manager University
Registration is open for the Fall Semester of Web Manager University.

Managing PDF Files

View the EPA PDF Standards documents

These documents include:

- A checklist for using PDFs on the web - a one-pager that's helpful to give contractors

- New linking standards, including issues on accessibility

- A recent white paper with Best Practices

EPA put significant effort into developing their PDF standards, and many agencies can take advantage of what EPA has accomplished.
The focus changed over the years. The Acrobat software kept improving. It was very difficult to do accessibility tagging in version 5. Newer versions of acrobat improve on the ability to do accessibility tagging.
PDFs are good for retaining the format of printed pages. In some cases, the pages may even have been scanned, but then they will not have any associated text. For a screen reader, you must use Alt Text for images. One of the typical problems is that Alt Text may become jumbled if there is more than one column in the document.
EPA recommends that PDF not be used for documents under five pages (better to use HTML).
EPA asked the CIO council for a 508 exception (undue burden justification) for more difficult documents. The CIO Council responded that the importance is on making information accessible, not simply PDFs; can do it other ways through HTML, flat text file, or by offering contact information, where someone can help the user read the document.
The 508 Accessibility Working Group had a different view: That you can provide alternate text only if there is no other way to do it within the document. Email attachments are not covered by 508, so can always make document available on demand and circumvent the rules, but this is not desirable.
The EPA white paper covers meta data (description and keywords), and ways to test and documents work with screen readers.
EPA’s Web Council recently approved a PDF linking standard that includes identifying in the link that the document is a PDF, and indicating in text next to the link the number of pages and the file size. A link to information about PDFs (including a link to get the free Adobe Reader) is also required.
There were many questions about using the accessibility software JAWS, and what others are using. JAWS is expensive to purchase; some places are using JAWS to randomly check for accessibility. Others are using IBM Homepage Reader, or the built-in text reader in Acrobat. But the Acrobat text reader in Acrobat does not fully recreate the user experience. Actual users are probably using something different, such as JAWS.
Someone brought up the issue of secure documents and that they cannot be tagged after they are made secure. Some people use the Common Look plug-in tester, but it can't read a secure document either. There was also discussion of how reliable (defeatable) Acrobat security features are and whether it makes sense to use them for documents published to the Web.
Reviewing PDFs is part of the overall review process at EPA. They have trained over 600 people on their standards. Not using any automated methods to do accessibility checking.
Acrobat 7 Professional is the latest version and is best adapted for making accessible PDFs. They are using version 6. It's probably not useful to be on cutting edge, but rather to wait a year to move to newer versions. There is a tradeoff between using older versions for users who haven't upgraded, versus increasing the accessibility features with newer versions. Consider both the Acrobat Reader and full package versions. If you save back to 5 from 7 you lose some accessibility features.
[The PDF Conference Call resulted in many online comments on the Forum list serve. Much to be learned and shared on this topic.]

Next Forum Call

The next call will be Thursday, October 19, 2006, from 11 – 12 EDT. If you have suggestions for the agenda, please contact Sheila Campbell.

Page Updated or Reviewed: August 31, 2006