Re: [orca-list] Acrobat a11y horribly broken

[Andrew Kirkpatrick <akirkpat adobe com>]

Forwarded to the product manager and engineering manager for more info...

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick

Senior Product Manager, Accessibility

Adobe Systems 

akirkpat adobe com


-----Original Message-----
From: William Walker Sun COM [mailto:William Walker Sun COM] 
Sent: Friday, May 22, 2009 5:28 PM
To: Erik Heil
Cc: Orca Developer's Mailing List; akirkpatrick adobe com
Subject: Re: [orca-list] Acrobat a11y horribly broken

Hi Erik:

Unfortunately, Orca's not able to work well with Acrobat because of 
accessibility issues inside Acrobat itself.  Since Acrobat is a closed 
system, we also cannot go into the sources to fix things for them and 
offer patches to Adobe.  Adobe also does not have a public bug database 
as far as I know.  So, all we can do is write Adobe e-mail and bring 
bugs to their attention.

Where things stand right now is that we've brought the accessibility 
issues to Adobe's attention and we've followed up with them several 
times to check on progress.  I've CC'd Andrew Kirkpatrick, who is 
Adobe's Corporate Accessibility Engineering Lead.  I realize this puts 
Andrew in a tough spot (sorry Andrew), but maybe he might be able to 
lend some insight into what Adobe is (or is not) doing in this space.

Will

Erik Heil wrote:
> Hi everyone.
> I seem to recall that is versions 7 and possibly 8, PDF documents were in
> fact accessible with Adobe Acrobat Reader. However, at some time in the
> future, a11y is horrible broken. The menu bars are read properly, but as
> far as rendering PDF documents in an accessible form, that's a no-go. If
> this has been brought up before, sorry for cluttering up the list with
> this message. My only viable solution is to find a version of a previous
> distribution where a11y is not at all broken. Luckily for me, I don't at
> all require any of the advanced features of the latest versions, but being
> able to find packaged versions of them that integrate well within Debian
> is becoming harder and harder to find. Any suggestions would be very
> welcome.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> eheil sdf lonestar org
> SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org
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