In amongst the release of PDF/UA-2 (PDF for Universal Accessibility) and the new Well-Tagged PDF (WTPDF) standard last month, some PDF professionals may have missed two other new resources that may help explain and view them:
On a recent project, we created a digital welcome packet for a hospital as an alternative to the 40+ page paper packet they give every patient.
The digital version would cost less (no press run), could be updated in real time, would produce less waste, and would be available on phones for patients and their families.
But solely relying on a digital version won’t work because not every patient will have access to it or may be impaired in a way that prevents them from using their phone.
@aardrian@grigs Great question! We tested using the Adobe Acrobat accessibility checks. Adding the option didn't make things perfect, but the PDF we were replacing was, uh, not accessible, like, at all, so the bar was very low. We did see that toggling the Prince setting added tagging and alt text, etc, but for sure this is one of those spots where I'm sure someone with deep knowledge of PDF a11y could help us find further improvements. https://www.princexml.com/doc/prince-output/#pdfua
The @PDFassociation has released a new "Well-Tagged PDF" (WTPDF) specification to accompany the upcoming release of PDF/UA-2 (ISO 14289-2) expected later this month. You can download the WTPDF specification for free from the PDF Association [1]
Keen PDF fans will want to check it out. But bear in mind that few applications yet generate PDFs meeting this spec, and assistive technology doesn't yet process them differently.
The new PDF/UA-2 (ISO 14289-2) standard for accessible PDFs is available for EUR €179 / USD $195 / CAD $265 [1].
The provisions in PDF/UA-2 are identical to those provided by "Well-Tagged PDF" (WTPDF).
So most accessibility practitioners will probably want the free WTPDF standard along with the PDF 2.0 (ISO 32000-2) standard - also free from @PDFassociation, sponsored by Adobe, Apryse and Foxit [2]
@wtfpdf@kmur Yes, these are great: densely packed with all kinds of reference info - including lots of tables on specific things that I'm only barely starting to learn about (!). Kudos to Peter and the PDF Association.
I did notice with some disappointment that the sheets themselves are not PDF/UA compliant, which means that they aren't fully accessible to all users. Hopefully that is something they can fix in a revision. 😬 #PDFUA#PDFAssociation#PDF#Accessibility