In a recent post, Bruce Lawson, a member of the Accessibility Task Force and notable funny-guy, gives the following pointers on accessibility:

Accessibility is not text-only or a separate “cripples-only” site
Disability is more than blindness…

PDF makes people happy as they think (incorrectly) that a PDF uncopyable and unamendable and a good way to get a document “on the web”.

99% of PDFs are therefore verbose, narrative rather than written for web and probably inaccessible.

As PDF isn’t html, the screenreaders can’t jump around it (yet) like they can html. For example, in html you can jump from heading to heading, list to list. In PDF, only the very newest JAWS (JAWS 7) can jump from heading to heading.

So, in my opinion, PDFs aren’t as accessible as html – and it’s a lot more difficult to make an accessible pdf than an accessible webpage.

(Pimp alert:) There’s a lot more about it in my book.

Your mileage may vary, of course.

The “panacea of PDF” was mentioned at the conference, and I wrote down no back button and no navigation – is there anything else you could add?

The DM is not browser based so I’ll take a look at the draft of WCAG 2.0, and the other resources too.

If it’s not browser-based, I guess WCAG 2.0 could be a good test, but it’s not finished yet (WCAG 2 is technology-neutral, so doesn’t pre-supposed html content). I’m just making this up here; there may be official tests for the accessibility of non-browser desktop systems, but that’s outside my field of expertise.

see here

http://www.w3.org/WAI/guid-tech.html