[accessibility] PDF Accessibility

[Boris Veytsman]

Hi,

I got a publisher interested in accessibility effort.  This is ACM,
Association for Computing Machinery.  I am working with them on the
redesign of their LaTeX classes, and we discussed the accessibility
options.  

Here is a fragment of our e-mail exchange [I deleted e-mails since
this is acrchived in a public archive - I can provide them]

*****************************************************************
    From: Craig Rodkin
    To: Boris Veytsman 
    CC: Bernard Rous 
    Subject: RE: Accessibility 

    This is great. I would think ACM would like to be a participant in the PDF Accessibility project. Bernie? 

    Please send us more information regarding this and we can then decide which staff member or ACM volunteer(s) would participate. 

    thanks
    -Craig
      
    Craig Rodkin
    Publications Operations Manager-ACM
    rodkin at hq.acm.org
    http://member.acm.org/~rodkin 
      
    Explore ACM's AUTHOR-IZER SERVICE:  http://www.acm.org/publications/acm-author-izer-service


    -----Original Message-----
    From: Boris Veytsman
    Sent: Thursday, November 19, 2015 7:41 PM
    To: Craig Rodkin
    Cc: Craig Rodkin; Bernard Rous
    Subject: Accessibility 

    CR> From: Craig Rodkin 
    CR> Date: Thu, 19 Nov 2015 16:00:26 +0000


    CR> Accessibility:
    CR> ACM needs to strive to provide accessible files whenever possible. 
    CR> In order to do so, we want authors to include alt-text tags for 
    CR> tables, figures, images, math, etc.  into their source (TeX and 
    CR> Word) files so that the output PDF (and HTML5) files will include 
    CR> accessible tags be able to be read into a Screen Reader programs 
    CR> like JAWS.

    CR> At the present time, I do not believe we can force authors to 
    CR> include the alt-text within their source documents; for now, we 
    CR> would need to make these optional tags.


    This is an important issue which was discussed thoroughly in the last several TeX conferences.

    I agree it is quite impossible to force authors to create tags; the right way is to produce these tags automatically by software, transparently to the authors.  This is the aim of the PDF Accessibility Working group at TUG [TeX Users Group, http://tug.org].
    I happen to be a member of this Working group.  Here is our page:
    http://tug.org/twg/accessibility/; there are several papers there about the state of the art here.

    I will use the existing solutions, but it should be understood that this is a developing field, and many tools are in the beta stage.

    Let me put for a moment another hat: the one of PDF Accessibility Working group member.  We now are contacting publishers interested in the development of tools for the automatic production of accessible PDF.  Would ACM be interested in joining the effort?  If yes, we should probably add to the discussion the other members of the Working group.

    --
    Good luck

    -Boris

    It isn't easy being a Friday kind of person in a Monday kind of world.

***************************************************************


Ross, could you please formulate the questions and opening for ACM?  

I thinks we need to work extremely fast

-- 
Good luck

-Boris

Prejudice:
	A vagrant opinion without visible means of support.
		-- Ambrose Bierce