Finding your way:

Accessible Web Page Design:
Are Adobe® PDF documents accessible?

Adobe Acrobat Access: Adobe Systems has an accessible-plug-in for Acrobat Reader.

What are PDF and the Acrobat Reader?

Adobe Acrobat Reader exists as a cross-platform application to view PDF documents: it is currently available in general release for the Microsoft Windows (3.1x, 95, and NT), Apple Macintosh, Sun SPARC, HP/UX, Silicon Graphics, and IBM AIX operating systems. There is also a version 1.0 available for DOS systems.

General Concepts:

• The Access Plug-in requires the Adobe Acrobat Reader: Version 3.0

Preliminary findings - Acrobat Access Plug-in:

In our opinion:

• Most simple PDF documents will be made accessible through the use of the Access plug-in.
• Some complex PDF documents will remain confusing or inaccessible even with the use of the Access plug-in.

The Guidelines:

Publishing information on the Web in format that requires an extra step for your visitors to be able to read it, even in widely supported format like PDF, has a negative impact on the general accessibility of your site. Many first-time visitors will not already have Acrobat Reader installed on their computer (or if they do have the software, it may not be the most recent version). These visitors, if they decide your information is important to them, will have to download the large installation files for the Adobe Reader. Since these files are currently in the two to three megabyte range, the download can be a long and tedious process. Users with visual disabilities will also have to download the Access plug-in: another 300K bytes.

• If you publish documents on-line in PDF format, you should inform users in plain text that PDF is being used, and explain that special software (Adobe Acrobat Reader) is required to view the documents.

  • Some of the documents on this site were created in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF). You will require a special viewer called Adobe Acrobat Reader to read them. This link will take you to Adobe System's accessible information page, where you can download the software, free of charge.

• You should also indicate that an accessible plug-in also exists which will allow access to the documents by persons using adaptive technology for screen-reading.

  • This link will take you to Adobe System's Access page which describes the Access (beta) plug-in. There, you can download it free of charge.

• Include a clearly defined hypertext link to the source of both Adobe Acrobat and the Access plug-in.

Finding your way.

Making Frames Accessible.
Using the <FONT> Tag.