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Comment by scrollaway | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

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