@fastfinge I try not to be dogmatic about much in accessibility. But one hill I will proudly die on every time is that there is no such thing as a universally accessible PDF.

You can get the tags right, test with users, spend 12 thousand dollars on it being professionally evaluated and remediated...

And then I'll open it on my phone, or in Chrome, or in Firefox, or in basically anything that isn't Acrobat and it will go wrong.

Maybe just a little bit, with a paragraph being incorrectly spread across multiple lines. Maybe a lot, with all of your expensive and careful tagging being completely discarded.

You don't know what will happen, I don't know what will happen. given that one of the only real selling points of PDF is that it will retain and faithfully reproduce visual layout and formatting, the fact that not even the tiniest bit of accessibility consistency exists makes it a rotten ecosystem.

@fastfinge And yes, I know lots of people have put lots of effort into PDF accessibility, both at the big tech and open source levels. My aim is not to dismiss that, but rather to acknowledge how practically bad things still are.

Mozilla, for instance, have probably come closest to creating a PDF parser -> renderer pipeline that respects accessibility tags and isn't made by Adobe. But even Firefox breaks single runs of text across screen reader cursor lines, sometimes with as little as one character each making text hard or impossible to follow.

On iOS, meanwhile, I can't reliably use VoiceOver's explore by touch in a PDF rendered by Apple's own software, which also occasionally turns individual letters or random bits of words into their own swipe targets while stripping Whitespace.

The various apps made specifically for blind readers with PDF support? I don't even trust them to accurately extract all the text, let alone present the tagging and formatting correctly.

@fastfinge Invariably, someone will read posts like this and think—maybe even post—PDF's not all that bad. They read a set restaurant menu on their phone just the other day!

What I say to that is: good, I'm glad they could do that. But also, they can't even independently be sure that they actually did read the full menu.

Still, that's two pages of relatively low stakes text. It's not a 265-page legal document which even Acrobat's accessibility layer took seven minutes to render and then caused the software to crash upon navigating to the first footnote.

And now I think I'm done. Thank you for reading.