On 22.10.2009 21:15:40 Simon Pepping wrote: > On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 05:12:00PM +0100, Vincent Hennebert wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Work on PDF accessibility is basically done. There are still some tests > > to perform and maybe a few tweaks here and there, but the main > > functionality is in place. > > > > So I???d like to start a vote for merging the branch back to the Trunk: > > https://svn.eu.apache.org/repos/asf/xmlgraphics/fop/branches/Temp_Accessibility > > Can you summarize what the branch tries to achieve?
I'll try. In short: it provides the Tagged PDF feature that some people have always wanted. Long story: Without the accessibility/document structure feature, FOP simply produces pages with visual content. Visually impaired people need tools like a screen reader to read document to them. For that the reader needs to know which parts of a page are important and which are not, and in which order the elements should be read. It needs to know that a sentence continues on the next page without stumbling over the page footer in the middle of the sentence. An image tells a blind person nothing, so it needs a descriptive text that the screen reader will read aloud in place of the image. There are laws in various countries that require certain organizations to produce barrier-free documents. The accessibility branches' main purpose is just to help with these requirements. PDF is the only format we support that has such features. If FOP implemented PDFXML or XPS, we could later support accessibility there, too, based on the work started here. There's another side-effect to tagged PDF: It allows for better text extraction from the document. PDF even describes ways to make round-trips from XML -> PDF -> XML -> PDF if certain conditions were met. However, we don't do that. Finally, with tagged PDF it is possible to create PDF/A-1a conformant documents in addition to the PDF/A-1b that we already support. That's important for long-term archival of documents. > > The vote will last the usual 3 days but, since it???s a non-trivial new > > feature, if any committer would like more time to review it, feel free > > to say so and we can extend the vote to 1 week. > > Can you make that 3 working days? Does that imply you don't work 7 days a week? ;-) Working days are what we usually apply here, don't we? > Simon > > -- > Simon Pepping > home page: http://www.leverkruid.eu Jeremias Maerki
