Questions following the Acrobat and WCAG2.0 Presentation

I was at today's webinar too. There were a lot of questions answered in chat, but I know some of mine didn't get answered either.

Can't help with #1 of your question, but for #2, when you say "AA doc" are you referring to a Adobe Acrobat PDF that was created before 2001?

We're working on the Q&A transcript from today's session and it will be posted with the on-demand version of the eSeminar so hopefully all your questions will be answered there.In regards to your first question, the PDFMaker macro ships with Acrobat including version 8. But you'll need to make sure that you're using at least version 8.1 of Acrobat because this was the first version to support Office 2007. Your plugin may have originally crashed if you were not using the latest updates. To re-enable the plugin, check out these [url=http://www.acrobatusers.com/forums/aucbb/viewtopic.php?id=1861]instructions[/url].

That must be what happened. I'll do the reinstall.

Yes...I have seen some ancient things out there on the web (legal docs on state gov sites) and advised them to take them down.

~j

Hi John,
re: Your item #2 -
What to do would seem to be predicated by what the legacy PDFs are.
If they are output PDFs from some authoring application then you have PDF content consisting of renderable text.
For these, post-processing with Acrobat Professional would yield PDFs that, done *right*, would be Section 508 compliant AND usable;
thus "accessible". While this would call for a greater level of effort, if the deliverable is to be PDFs that are functionally accessible to
those using AT then that is what gets done. At the end of the day this might well cost less than future litigation brought about by
deliverables that are superficially "accessible".
Taking hardcopy of something already digital and scanning it into PDF can result in its own genre of issues.

If the legacy PDFs are already scanned images then Acrobat Professional can be used to process the Figure tags.
Reliance on the OCR text (of textual images) pretty much assures usability issues. Even 'good' OCR output will be salted
some with "mis-reading" of what some characters are (by the OCR engine). Often OCR output (due to variables not associated with the
given OCR engine) is less than 'good'.
In a PDF, the hidden text that is the OCR will be rendered by the AT application (and Adobe's Read Aloud).
What's served up is, at best, a wee bit salty or, at worst, so salted with blivets as to undigestable.
All of which is to say, not usable and thus not accessible.
Of course, if the scanned image is of a legal document then using anything other than a searchable image (exact) approach
results in altering the source image. Is the altered output still "true, accurate, complete, ...." to the original?
Tagging the image with the Figure tag element is not so hard and I believe there are companies that can utilize programmatic approaches.
What to use for Alternate or Actual (replacement) text is a more significant problem. While I suspect this too may be processed programmatically what do we use for the text?
"This is a scanned image of some text." or something similiarly "brief" may not yield a functionally usable PDF for those using AT applications.

For legacy stuff that *must* be online it might be possible for your clients to engage in a work-study (or something similar) arrangement
with local schools (business - trade - junior college - whatnot) whereby participating students re-key the documents, do a first pass QC
and submit the output PDF to the sponsor entity. The students could obtain some class credits and be exposed to the work world
environment and infra-structure documents of importance to the sponsor entity.

Be well...

Thanks for the thoughtful and thorough response.

~j