Dear #a11y friends w/ screen readers: I just ran into the following question and haven't been able to do any testing myself yet, so your experience would help me a lot to start from: How accessible are the PDF viewers built into browsers? Do any of the browsers take into account the accessibility features in the PDF, or does the PDF itself hardly matter and the browsers ruin most of it anyway? Or is my intuition fooling me and the viewers are actually quite good? Thanks for your observations!
Marco Zehe
in reply to Joschi Kuphal • • •Joschi Kuphal
in reply to Marco Zehe • • •@Marco Thank you, Marco! That largely confirms my suspicions, and your approach also sounds like what I would have imagined.
A few cursory attempts with a PDF/UA give me a very mixed picture: NVDA performs quite passably in both Firefox and Chrome. Headings, lists and even tables seem to work well. JAWS in Chrome at least gives me headings, but in Firefox I have no access to content at all (I may have done something wrong in a hurry).
Marco Zehe
in reply to Joschi Kuphal • • •Joschi Kuphal
in reply to Marco Zehe • • •@Marco Alright, thanks for letting me know. I guess I should put together a reference document and then do some proper testing in all possible combinations. I'll do that as soon as I find some time.
Assuming that an HTML variant is out of the question and a vendor has to provide a PDF, do you think the way you described (inbuilt PDF viewer first, fallback to download + Acrobat Reader / Preview) is reasonable?
WestphalDenn
in reply to Joschi Kuphal • • •