Some of you might be interested in this Mastodon thread. It’s a bit of bashing PDFs for having poor accessibility, and some guidance on improving PDFs for accessibility.
Some people are saying they prefer MS Word over PDF for accessibility reasons. Of course the elephant in the room is that “accessibility” is an over-loaded word. It usually refers to usability by impaired people, but in the case of being generally usable to all people on a broad range of platforms, MS Word is obviously inaccessible due to being encumbered by proprietary tech by a protectionist corporation.
I dislike Microsoft Office as much as anybody else, but there’s a certain privilege of being able to conveniently use different (FOSS) tools and technologies that’s often ignored in these discussions.
tl;dr there are better suited e-book formats popular with pirates
XML was made into many formats, not obly DOCX but also FB2, EPUB if you need to just store formatted text. They are light, not resource heavy, and they adapt to any custom styling – so it’s ideal for both sighted and blind persons on any device. I’ve read FBs even before smartphones. They have their quircks and need an improvement, but there’s a reason it’s popular with free ebooks.
What Adobe accomplishes with PDF is selling an idea of digital books to publishers. It promises to keep the page layout fixed, unchangeable and implements a basic DRM so it’s content can’t be easily copied. There’s also no guarantee it’s a recognized text, a correctly recognized at that, not a gibberish, and due to a fixed layout may have an unobvious, erroneus formatting. Basically, if you get a PDF and rely on TTS engines, it’s cat in the box, but there are no way someone is insane enough to compile any XML file entirely from pictures.
As I’m poor-ass motherfucker who don’t buy digital books, for me it’s obvious. But, as I said, PDFs are popular with publishers so you see them sold everywhere.
And for DOCX - until you need to edit content, all these functions and added weight are of no use, and, honestly, as a format and as a tool it’s just a clusterfuck that people often use for things it’s not meant too until it breaks. Still, if choosing a book format, it’s too just a scrollable text that has free software to tackle.
Although I’m not a blind person myself, I hope my info helps.
edit: After reading the thread I suspect it’s a little bit of solving problems we ourselves invent. Plain text is ideal as it doesn’t put any restriction on usability, accesebility at all. Then we get formatting with FB2 and EPUB, then get advanced formatting, further adding decorations a blind person can’t see - and we have Word, free alternatives for that, and we don’t really lose much yet. And then we have PDFs with paid editing (unless you can code) that may as well be just a scan, a picture - the most popular way of using PDF documents I know. It’s great that someone makes and maintains the tools needed to access the most sold format accessible, but it seems if there was indeed care for that, PDF should’ve been deprecated long ago. It creates obstacles on the way to sell itself, and then there are some anti-tools to market it as a non so hostile thing. And as Adobe is built around creating software to edit visual content and inventing new technics to lock out a user from tools, they don’t look like friends to blind folks. Even compared to Microsoft who had some push in accessibility with their controllers after CEO happened to have a child with disability.
Blind people can access and require markup. Headings are used for understanding and navigating large documents.
You’re drawing conclusions from a poor understanding of the technology and how it’s used.
Headings and other structural elements exist in many formats I mentioned. I don’t understand your point. I haven’t say that they don’t matter.
Then we get formatting with FB2 and EPUB, then get advanced formatting, further adding decorations a blind person can’t see
Did I misinterpret your idea of advanced formatting?
Yes, I guess? At this layer of my completely made up geniology of texts, having an EPUB or a FB2 file we can already assume an XML that has not only structure (a tree of headers on different levels) but also different structural parts like quotes, references etc, including hyperlinks to other texts. I’m sure a blind persons can access them if they have tools to do so, and if said files are formatted right.
DOCX adds more tools, xml tags, like defining colors of elements, putting things into a table, putting pictures, adjusting alignment of said elements to the right, to the left, to center, while it makes no sense for a reader if it’s not a header, or a quote, or what. It, and many other things, make it too complex for a book.
And PDFs also adds a fixed layout to that circus, besides their copy and print protection.
I’m sorry if I’m igorant about how you operate. I know only about files, not people. And I can easily miss a valid point in that conversation.
All that information can be parsed by screen readers. Don’t get me wrong, lots of blind people use plaintext files on a regular basis, but it’s possible and relevant to have access to all of that information. Anybody can dislike tables, but that’s the best structure for certain kinds of information, so why not make it accessible and use it when it’s relevant? I’ve produced EPUB files with tables based on Markdown sources, it’s not even that hard.
I adore EPUB, as a concept, but it’s unreasonable for people to have a program that’ll read it, at least when compared to PDF. Even Word - which was forcefully made open by regulators - can be read by FOSS software.
One could argue that the most complete and robust document navigation and reading experience can be attained through a combination of Windows, Word and JAWS. Hopelessly closed and corporate software. When you need to get work done though, you’re better off throwing money at the problem, in exchange for predictability, reliability and support. I’m typing this on a Mac, by the way, because I want my Unix system to work for me, not the other way around.
@soloActivist@links.hackliberty.org and @andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works: @MostlyBlindGamer@rblind.com is correct. Bluntly, everyone who hopelessly advocates for a FOSS world takeover is almost always not blind. There is in fact a massive amount of privilege inherent in being able to ditch proprietary tools for FOSS ones. I personally use Windows, Microsoft 365, and the JAWS screen reader every single day because they are the most mature, accessible, it-just-works solution which collectively allows me and thousands of other blind and low vision people to receive an education and do our jobs. There are many reasons for this, but the primary ones are that that Windows is the most used operating system in the workplace, Microsoft 365 is also the most used office suite, some of the money which is scarfed up by the “protectionist corporation” named Microsoft is spend on hiring blind/low vision programmers and accessibility professionals who work to make their applications accessible, and JAWS is written by blind and low vision programmers who’s day job literally consists of developing an application which interfaces with other applications to fully make them usable by other blind and low vision people. Whether you like capitalism or not, there is no denying that all of these folks need to put food on the table, and that someone who is paid to write accessible software is generally going to produce and maintain better code. Meanwhile, accessibility in the world of FOSS is almost never done by people who are paid to do it as a primary function of their jobs. Rather, accessibility is usually tossed to the community where it is then left to die, which is exactly what happens with Linux Desktop Environments and FOSS applications such as LibreOffice. LibreOffice is, for example, useless on Windows if one wishes to do anything more than basic word-processing. The NVDA screen reader lives in a gray area, however it is still deficient in many respects including Microsoft 365 and Braille support because specific application optimization’s have effectively been kicked to the community. In other words, the reality for disabled people and accessibility in general is often summed up by the adage “you get what you pay for.” I’ll leave the discussion of whether or not this is an ethical state of affairs to wiser thinkers than I.
and that someone who is paid to write accessible software is generally going to produce and maintain better code.
In my day job I’m paid to write code. Then I go home write code I was not paid for. My best work is done without pay.
Commercial software development
When I have to satisfy an employer, they don’t want quality code. They want fast code. They want band-aid fixes. The corporate structure is very short-sighted. I was once back-roomed by a manager and lectured for “gold plating”. That means I was producing code that was higher quality than what management perceives as the economic sweet spot. I was also caught once fixing bugs as I spotted them when I happened to have a piece of code checked out in Clearcase. I was told I was “cheating the company out of profits” because they prefer if the bug goes through a documentation procedure so the customer can ultimately be made to pay separately for the bug fix. Nevermind the fact that my time was already compensated by the customer anyway - but they can get more money if there’s a bigger paper trail involving more staff. So when you say you get what you pay for, that’s what you pay for – busy work (aka working hard not smart). They also want “consistent quality”. So if one module is higher quality than another, there is pressure to lower the quality of the better module because improving the style or design pattern of the lower quality piece is “gold plating”. When I make full use of the language constructs (as intended by the language designers), I am often forced by an employer to use more basic constructs. Employers are worried that junior engineers or early senior engineers who might have to maintain my code will encounter language constructs that are less common and it will slow them down to have to look up the syntax they encounter. Employers under-estimate the value of developers learning on the job. So I am often forced avoid using the more advanced constructs to accommodate some subset of perceived lowest common denominator. E.g. if I were to use an array in bash, an employer might object because some bash maintainers may not be familiar with an array.
Non-commercial software development
Free software developers have zero schedule pressure. They are not forced to haphazardly rush some sloppy work into an integration in order to meet some deadline that was promised to a customer by a manager who was pressured to give an overly optimistic timeline. #FOSS devs are free to gold plate all they want. And because it’s a labor of love and not labor for a paycheck, FOSS devs naturally take more pride in their work. I’m often not proud of the commercial software I was forced to write by a corporation fixated on the bottom line. When I’m consistently pressured to write poor quality code for a profit-driven project, I hit a breaking point and leave the company. I’ve left 3 employers for this reason.
Commercial software from a user PoV
Whenever I encounter a bug in commercial software, there is almost never a publicly accessible bug tracker and it’s rare that the vendor has the slightest interest in passing along my bug report to the devs. The devs are unreachable by design (cost). I’m just one user so my UX is unimportant. Obviously when I cannot even communicate a bug to a commercial vendor, I am wholly at the mercy of their testers eventually rediscovering the bug I found, which is unlikely when there are complex circumstances.
Non-commercial software from a user PoV
Almost every FOSS app has a bug tracker, forum, or IRC channel where bugs can be reported and treated. I once wrote a feature request whereby the unpaid FOSS developer implemented my feature request and sent me a patch the same day I reported it. It was the best service I ever encountered and certainly impossible in the COTS software world for anyone who is not a multi-millionaire.
Thanks for your response and perspective. Yes, it could’ve been ridiculous to gatekeep what software people should use if some may provide a better experience out of the box. Worst case scenario it could’ve been seen like using people with disabilities as a vehicle for own principles like FOSS, anticapitalism etc. No need to limit their options. And it’s great that even greed, not pure altruism, can serve as a reason to make services more accesible.
One another question to you though, as it seems related: I’ve seen the Internet Archive and some other services provided an unique option to access even copyrighted materials one can’t just download there through some kind of a special program, registry, exclusively to visually impared folks. Have you ever used that? Are that and other such initiatives frequently used in blind community? What’s with the amounts of books they list, can they help with one’s interest in learning, reading?
A blog post about the Internet Archive’s collection, by their team: https://archive.org/post/305502/over-1-million-digital-books-now-available-free-to-the-print-disabled
I’m not familiar with that, but I’m aware of services for blind people to access books for free. It’s a good way to balance out the disproportionate lack of access to information.
