Microsoft improves accessibility in their PDFs

Microsoft continues investing in accessible PDF

On May 16 Microsoft announced a major investment in accessible PDF. The company has enhanced Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Microsoft 365 with “...over 100 improvements to PDF/UA tags”. This timing is all very relevant given the recent publications of the PDF Association’s Well-Tagged PDF specification and ISO’s standardization of WTPDF’s Conformance Level for Accessibility via PDF/UA-2 for PDF 2.0.

Talking about PDF with NISO’s Unfettered Access

NISO (National Information Standards Organization) is where content publishers, libraries, and software developers go for information industry standards that support collaboration and interoperability.

NISO’s Unfettered Access webcast series touches on developments in related technologies and industries that affect NISO’s core constituencies. In their latest episode, NISO’s Executive Director, Todd Carpenter interviewed PDF Association CEO Duff Johnson about the industry engagement that goes into the ongoing enhancement of the PDF file format. Among other subjects, we discussed various functionalities that get overlooked and the best ways to encourage developers to improve the accessibility of the format.

Android and iOS improve their PDF handling

Wired reports that Android 15 (code name “Vanilla Ice Cream”) is currently in beta and will provide far better PDF handling: “PDFs should load more smoothly, and there is now support for password-protected files, annotations, form editing, and copy selection. Perhaps best of all, you can now search within PDF files.”

On the other side of the fence, Apple’s iOS 17.2 finally introduced the long-awaited improved AutoFill capabilities for PDF based on in-built machine learning algorithms. This was originally announced at Apple’s WWDC’23 event with other PDF capabilities touted to challenge Google Docs…

A major vulnerability fixed in pdf.js

Codean Labs has discovered a significant vulnerability in pdf.js, Mozilla’s JavaScript-based PDF viewer (CVE-2024-4770). This bug allows attackers to execute arbitrary JavaScript code (not PDF JavaScript!) when a malicious PDF file is opened.

As Firefox uses pdf.js to display PDF files the vulnerability affects not only all Firefox users with versions less than 126, but also many other applications that use pdf.js (those before version 4.2.67). Firefox 126, Firefox ESR 115.11, and Thunderbird 115.11 have all been fixed and publicly released earlier in May.

If you develop a JavaScript application that handles PDF files you should check that you are not (indirectly) using a vulnerable version of pdf.js. Read more…

PDFacademicBot for May, 2024

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