On 4/29/25 23:17, Matthias Weber wrote:
Hi Pablo,
I was merely reporting what Previews and Acrobat on the Mac do with the current image accessibility provided by ConTeXt.
Hi Matthias, the issue here may be that there might be be software not being able to read aloud PDF/UA documents properly.
I have no idea whether that is enough for vision-impaired people. It might be that there are screen readers available that do a perfect job. At some point I will need to produce documents that are accessible. For that my documents will have to pass a test (to which I don’t have access before submitting the document…). I have no idea whether “passing the test” means that the document is usable for someone with vision impairment. Of course I would like that to be the case, too, but my abilities to test for any of that are limited.
A perfectly opaque process, the one you mention for accesibility testing. Far from ideal (to say the least).
I tried the first page from https://www.recht.bund.de/bgbl/1/2025/104/regelungstext.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=3.
It passes Acrobat’s accessibility check, hovering over the image produces the alternate text, letting Acrobat read the document ignores the Bundesadler.
Sorry, I understood the opposite, namely Acrobat read aloud the alternate text for the image (https://mailman.ntg.nl/archives/list/ntg-context@ntg.nl/message/K5EHLCFPVSOI...). The PDF document should be the same as then, so what is different now? As for other software, I’m totally ignorant. As far as the PDF/UA is ok, this is fine for me. This isn’t that I do not care, but something more complex.
I am having similar issues with having formulas read on the Mac. I can see the XML attachments in Acrobat, but what Acrobat or Preview do with them is horrendous.
PDF/UA-1 or PDF/UA-2? Maybe in PDF/UA-2 alternate text is chosen above MathML by the screen reader.
And as for my final comment about the “only benefit”: It seems to me that the two programs I tried on the Mac are bringing no benefit to the vision-impaired. That’s said, but nothing ConTeXt can help with. It just makes everything more complicated, because I have no means of telling whether what I am trying to do to make documents accessible is effective in any way.
I think there are ways. As for your Preview and VoiceOver, users can request (and even demand) from Apple to comply with the EU Accessibility Directive. If that doesn’t work, users can also inform their national authority (or even the Commission) about non-compliant programs. Of course, first you have to be sure that the programs have issues with documents (other than the ones generated by ConTeXt; the recent ones from the »Bundesgesetzblatt« would be fine in Germany). Then, there should be a relatively detailed list of glitches in accessibility. Of course, this is my opinion. And I agree, it‘s a hassle. But I think it may be the only way to get it in some cases (companies not caring enough to comply). Just in case it might help, Pablo