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SuffolkLITLab / FormFyxer

A tool for learning about and pre-processing forms
MIT License
11 stars 1 forks source link

Add information about whether the PDF is tagged (relevant to accessibility with a screen reader) #103

Closed nonprofittechy closed 1 year ago

nonprofittechy commented 1 year ago

See: https://web.archive.org/web/20190702113639/https://alistapart.com/article/pdf_accessibility/

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12731090/how-to-determine-if-pdf-is-tagged-or-not

nonprofittechy commented 1 year ago

Example of a tagged PDF: https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/OHE/CDPH%20Document%20Library/Accessible-CDPH_OHE_Disparity_Report_Final%20(2).pdf

nonprofittechy commented 1 year ago

An untagged PDF: Pro Se 1 Complaint for a Civil Case.pdf

BryceStevenWilley commented 1 year ago

The PDF Spec does have a lot of extra information about what needs to be present for accessibility (like alt text, language identifiers, etc.) We could add more, but I'm not sure how much it's worth it, since all of the fixes to those are a lot more technical, and might require better tooling for authors, and I don't want to encourage people to put a ton of effort into making their PDFs accessible when half as much effort could be spent publishing docxs instead, idk

I guess that the implicit point is that the thing we've been calling "RateMyPdf" so far has been "Rate the digital version of my paper form", and going too far down the PDF accessibility road starts to seem like we'd be encouraging the use of PDFs and just reaching a local maximum of PDF accessibility instead of a much higher global maximum of accessibility in general.