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Comment by pvorb | Hacker News Reader

I fully agree with all of your points.

I just wanted to point out the irony that the manual and other documentation for this "inclusive design" toolkit come as PDFs – the worst choice you can make if you strive for accessibility.

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PDFs can be accessible, and many of them are! Everyone who works with PDF needs to know about PDF/A:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

PDF/A is a small family of sub-formats to PDFs which amount to the accessible subset of PDF + some requirements.

PDF/A and PDF/UA are mandated by a variety of governments for PDF distribution. They're very suitable to archival and are accessible (screenreaders can work with them, their text can be cleanly copied, etc).

PDFs are fine but their time will come to an end for one big reason: they were invented to reproduce defined-size paper forms.

This is their strength: You know a PDF will not shift its presentation due to device changes. PDFs from when the PDF was created still work right today. And they still look the same.

That might be true, but these ones are not. I can't efficiently read them on my smartphone and have to scroll around a lot. They also show two pages on one, probably to be better printable for some marketing material, but I would never want to print a PDF that's mostly black, because that would overwhelm my printer. I'm also not near a printer right now. This is clearly inaccessible to me.

HTML, on the other side, can be easily made readable on any device. Even if the author didn't care, through readable mode in my browser.

PDFs are often the BEST way to read something. I prefer PDF text books over any other format, because (not very good) computer algorithms laying out text is inferior to proper professional layout.

Why would you read PDFs on a smart phone anyway?

> Why would you read PDFs on a smart phone anyway?

Is there another option here?

Yeah, read it on a large tablet, or on a large computer display.

Ironic to read this comment in an article of someone reading a web page on a PSP.

PDF/A isn't necessarily accessible. First, PDF is very hard to impossible to scale for people who need big writing, due to reflowing being unavailable or not working properly. Text in PDF/A can still be a big image, e.g. in a scan for archival purposes, if you are "lucky" there is an OCR overlay, but then your screenreader reads OCR'd text which is hit-or-miss. And text ordering is supposed to be "reading order" in PDF/A, but many tools, especially DTP tools make a mess of it and jumble up the (screenreader-visible) order of text in textboxes, columns and sometimes even paragraphs.

IME PDF/A is better than nothing, but far worse than plain HTML for accessibility..

There is no OCR overlay in /A, what are you talking about? It should be the original text.

If it's scanned copies then all it is is a bunch of images, not A compliant.

Scanned images are totally PDF/A-compliant. The standard is just about reproducible archiving, nothing else. Bitmaps are perfectly reproducible and pass every compliance check. That PDF/A is more accessible than any old PDF is just a side-effect.

I may be missing something obvious, but why is pdf such a bad choice?

As long as it has actual text and is reasonably typeset (selecting text in this pdf seems to work properly), I don't see what's wrong. I'd take it any day over webpages with random floating content that you have to click through and use a modern browser with javascript without blockers/filters for the content to even render, in small text on 20% of the page, with low contrast and somehow broken zoom.

I would assume PDFs don't typically work well with screen readers, which is what a large part of web accessibility is designed for.

As PDF is essentially saying, “put this thing here”, you’d think it wouldn’t. But it does. You can embed the source text for screen readers. It’s also how copying text from PDFs works.

As long as they're produced in a reasonable way, they work just fine. The option was even included natively in adobe reader 9 https://www.montgomeryschoolsmd.org/departments/hiat/tech_qu...

Where it breaks down is some badly designed OCR systems which place the letters independently rather than in lines/blocks. But that's starting from a document which was not accessible in the first place, so not a huge issue.

The whole topic of this thread is reading web pages on a PSP. There's a whole universe of devices that perfectly render good old server-side HTML with CSS styling, but can't display a PDF for reasons. Or if they can, it will be annoying because it won't fit on the screen and be readable at the same time. That's its unique selling point as well as its biggest drawback.

I have to admit that many modern SPAs also won't rendet on many devices, though.

What sort of file types are preferable? I'm not very familiar with accessible tech.

HTML, as demonstrated by the article, is accessible by default.

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