Comments on: PDF vs. HTML

By: Christopher Phillips

Christopher Phillips — Thu, 10 Jun 2004 21:05:56 +0000

Thanks for your comments– this is definitely an important issue. My experience with marking up Word/PDF documents is that it is not an extremely intuitive or user-friendly process. Is it easier than creating an HTML page? I suppose that depends primarily on what training and resources are available to faculty. If faculty were given a template with a well-defined style sheet for a Word to PDF document it would definitely be doable for most people, but I think that the same could be said of an HTML document.
Unfortunately few if any of the tools commonly used in creating either format still have a ways to go in encouraging (or forcing) users to create accessible documents.
As for some of the reasons that I prefer HTML over PDF– look for a post in the near future…

By: Carey

Carey — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 16:38:32 +0000

Adobe Acrobat became popular because of its ability to preserve the layout, typographic, and other visual qualities of documents in a world frustrated by so many variations in available fonts, browser quirks, and proprietary document viewing programs. Designers and authors were willing to put forth the money and time to use Acrobat because the final product’s visual accuracy was “worth it”. But in creating this safe zone for preserving visual design, Adobe ignored, until version 6, the need for internal markup to reflect the conceptual organization of content. This fundamental preference for visual design over conceptual organization will not disappear any time soon because Adobe will never abandon their original purpose for Acrobat. They are trying to have it both ways, but at its very best, Acrobat will always be visual with structure added. HTML on the other hand was designed around hierarchically structured content and only became concerned with visual design as an after-thought. In an accessible Web-based learning environment, structure and consistency are everything and visual design fidelity is nearly nothing. Therefore HTML (or better yet XHTML) IS the future of accessible markup and PDF has no short-term future. Universities would be wiser to develop and distribute well-designed CSS2 style sheets to be applied to standard HTML tagged documents than to train their faculty and staff to master the mysteries of Acrobat Accessibility Plug-ins.

By: Bill Creswell

Bill Creswell — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 10:49:36 +0000

I am not a usability expert, but here are my comments:
I thought that version 6.0 speech feature was cool, and found it without any notice that it was available.
I don’t like pdf for general information, because it is harder to index in a site search, and I would rather not download an entire article, just to read in the first five lines that it is not what I was looking for.
But it has a place, for archive information that needs to be looked at more that once, for printing, and for re-distribution in a common format.
It has a strong place as a file/reporting format.

By: temelini

temelini — Mon, 24 May 2004 19:31:32 +0000

I think that the good folks at WebAIM make some important points, in general, about pdf documents and accessibility. I do have to say, though, that I was surprised at the somewhat flimsy “words of caution” that were put forth by WebAIM when thinking about using Acrobat to create “accessible files.” I agree with most of John-Paul’s points that he makes in refuting the WebAIM document. The first five cautions do not in fact have anything to do with the Acrobat software itself– they caution that USERS might not “have the software.. be afraid to use it, etc.” I think that it is a very good thing that Adobe is working hard toward making pdfs accessible… this is certainly a positive step in the right direction, albeit not perfect.

In a perfect world, everyone creating websites would have access to a web developer who is up to speed on the latest in accessibility, and perhaps even the money to hire that person. This, unfortunately, is not so now, nor will it ever be that way. Web experts these days need to be more specialized than ever. There is no escaping the fact, however, that schools and other organizations will continue to create websites without using “professionals.” There is also no doubt that both Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat are not going away anytime soon. If anything they are becoming more ubiquitous. So if (and admittedly this is a big IF…) Adobe continues to move toward making it easy to mark up simple word docs so that the resulting pdfs are accessible, then I think it is more realistic to go this way, at least for now, then to cling to the hope that teachers and others will somehow yearn to become expert in XML and the subtle nuances of code.

Now please take this all with the knowledge that I have not had much experience in marking up Word docs or pdf so that they are able to be read by screen readers. If people need to go ahead and get some advanced training on how to mark these up just like one would go about posting accessible text in general, then I believe that one should go ahead and learn html. My feeling is that this is not in fact the case. But that is for someone else to comment on.