Thread by @Krischi

This is a long rant, but if we ever want to get accessibility right, we must address this type of barrier in content creation. I have long maintained that it must be easy to create accessible content, and hard to create inaccessible content. (1/11)

This means authoring tools must have robust accessibility support built in from the ground up. Case in point: @Microsoft has prided itself on making great strides in accessible document creation by improving accessibility workflows, accessibility checking & PDF conversion. (2/11)

I have praised Microsoft for this in the past. Unfortunately, as I learned the hard way recently with the #ASSETS2019 conference, there is something much more fundamentally broken about the process of creating accessible PDFs with Microsoft Word. (3/11)

On a Mac, even with the latest version of Word 2016, it is outright impossible to create a tagged PDF that also has the fonts embedded, as required by the publisher. And the online version of Office 365 cannot create a tagged PDF with fully embedded fonts, either. (4/11)

Worse, the PDF creation also lost accessibility information for tables that were done correctly in the source document. Worst of all, vector charts with alt text were converted to PDF in a manner that would have required adding alt text for the entire element hierarchy. (5/11)

Stumped, we consulted with the resident accessibility expert on the program committee. We had the unpalatable choice of converting the vector chart to bitmaps with alt text with loss of quality, or laboriously eliminating a total of 154 PDF tags by hand in Acrobat DC. (6/11)

From beginning to end, it took three people, ten man-hours, and a PDF conversion of the document from the Windows version of MS Word, followed by more editing in Adobe Acrobat DC, to produce an accessible PDF that also met the publisher requirements. All for 12.5 pages. (6/11)

If not for the mandate that all PDFs at #ASSETS2019 must be accessible, we would have thrown up our hands here. That’s even though we do accessibility research for a living and are more committed than most. What chance does the average person have? (7/11)

The sad fact is that for many, even with the best of intentions, it turns out to be nigh impossible to produce accessible content. More to the point, how can we in good conscience berate the average person for not making their content accessible if it is so darned hard? (8/11)

There is so much broken here. I see no fix short of a fundamental change in how @Microsoft and @Adobe manage accessible content. For starters, document conversions should not produce inconsistent results depending on platform. (9/11)

Neither should conversions break accessibility done right in the source document. Fixing accessibility in a PDF, which is the fault of the poor document conversion process in the first place, should never a premium paid feature. It must be standard in the free edition. (10/11)

That just sends the overall message that accessibility is still an afterthought, notwithstanding all the commitment that the players in this space have professed. We can and must do better. @jeffbigham @jennylayfluffy @awkawk @blakereid (11/11)