Duff Johnson reviews a recent report on PDF content accessibility produced by the Australian federal government. The Report accurately characterizes the current state of affairs for Assistive Technology (AT) users attempting to interact with PDF content. However, it does not clearly identify the reasons why most AT users have a poor experience with PDF. Additionally, the Report provides no comparison of PDF accessibility, functionality, remediation complexity or cost with alternative formats. As a result, several of the Report’s key conclusions are unsupported by the data presented.
The PDF/A Competence Center, the professional association of the PDF/A community, expects great progress in PDF/A adoption over the next two years. The Centers new Board reflects increasing international focus, with Germanys Olaf Drümmer as the new chairman of the Board, new vice chair Duff Johnson from the United States and new Board member Stewart Rogers from the United Kingdom.
PDF/A-1a goes beyond visual preservation by requiring document structure that supports accessibility, searchability, and content reuse. Learn what the “a” in PDF/A-1a really means and why accessible PDFs are essential for long-term archiving and compliance.
The European Patent Convention says up to 4,000 new patent applications and specifications are published every week. Since its foundation in 1978, the European Patent Office has published around 3.3 million patent documents. The global intellectual property database espacenet storing all electronically available patent documents worldwide contains currently around 80 million patent documents and is growing yearly by more than 2 million documents. Could PDF/A be a solution for them?