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Accessibility features in 9 Pro vs. 9 Pro Extended?

cwparks
Registered: Apr 2 2009
Posts: 36

We were recently upgraded from Acrobat 8 to 9 Pro, but I was told last year that to really get under the hood when making docs accessible, we would need 9 Pro Extended. We'd like to be able to justify the additional upgrade, but the comparison table on the Acro home page (where the bean counters look) only shows a handful of features added in 9 Pro Extended that we don't need (audio/video related, mostly).

We process Word docs, PPTs, XLSs, existing PDFs, and even scanned PDFs (!) from various agencies. We do what we can to clean up and structure the original docs when possible, but we often end up messing around in the Tags & Content panels, which are way easier to work with in 9 Pro than they were in 8. We also produce fairly complex fillable, "accessible" forms, also much smoother in 9 Pro.

At this point, our mandate is simply to provide a clean accessibility report from Acrobat with each PDF. I know that doesn't necessarily mean they're truly accessible or 508-compliant, and someday the powers-that-be may figure that out, but for now, that's all they want. We've been asking for a real screen reader like JAWS for over a year; it may be forthcoming in the not-too-distant future, but in the meantime we limp by with ROL.

In general, 9 Pro is making most of our work considerably less painful. We're grateful to have it!

But if 9 Pro Extended would make our lives even easier, we'd love it! Can anybody tell me if there are features that we need in 9 Pro Extended that we don't have in 9 Pro, like better ways of working with tags or less cryptic acessibility errors?

Thanks!
Caroline

My Product Information:
Acrobat Pro 9.0, Windows
Dimitri
Expert
Registered: Nov 1 2005
Posts: 1389
Hi cwparks,

Not that I know of. Acrobat 9 Pro Extended is the same as Pro except it includes the 3D features, Adobe Presenter, some advanced Flash embedding functionality- none which would help out with accessibility. Where did you hear it would?

Here is a product matrix for the different flavors of Acrobat- no advanced accessibility features are listed for Pro Extended.
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/matrix.php

Hope this helps,

Dimitri
www.pdfscripting.com
www.windjack.com
cwparks
Registered: Apr 2 2009
Posts: 36
Thanks, Dmitri -- that's the same matrix I was looking at. I just wondered if there were any other tidbits that might be too fine-grained to appear in that format.

Sometime last spring, someone (Duff Johnson, I believe?) was kind enough to answer a few questions over the phone about issues I was having with tags when we were working in Acro 8. I have it in my head that he said we really needed 9 Pro Extended for the work we were doing, but he might have just said we needed to upgrade to 9.

Anyway, there's no question that 9 Pro makes it much easier to do what we need, and if there's no point in pushing for Pro Extended then we'll just be happy with what we've got!

Thanks again for your quick reply!

Caroline
cwparks
Registered: Apr 2 2009
Posts: 36
One more question, Dmitri -- do you know if it's possible for presentations containing animations to be made accessible using Presenter?

If so, we'd find it useful to have at least one license for Pro Extended...but again, if it's not, we'll be happy with 9 Pro and stop bugging our leads for Pro Extended!

Thanks so much, Dmitri!
Caroline