[Athen] Accessibility of Adobe Acrobat Pro

[Howard Kramer]

Thank you Ron, Wink - for you feedback. Disappointing but helpful to know.

-Howard

From: athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Ron Stewart
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2013 4:53 PM
To: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network'
Subject: RE: [Athen] Accessibility of Adobe Acrobat Pro

Evening,  the base answer is no unfortunately.  We just did a huge document remediation project for one of our major clients, not the first one.  One of the reasons that we did it is because their internal folks who require non-mouse based access could just not do the work to meet the needs of users both with and without disabilities and this is one of the largest providers of content in the English speaking world.  I like the work, but to be honest I also regret taking it on.

I do not believe that ADOBE has spent any significant resources in making their document development environments even marginally accessible.  The exception would be Dreamweaver, but even there you need to operate in code mode.  None of the WYSIWIG interfaces even come close.   Would love to hear that I am wrong, but for me accessible does not also mean that I have to memorize a whole slew of non-standard keyboard commands.  That does not mean that it is impossible, but like Google ADOBE has played this love hate game with accessibility for a long time.  I have to commend their accessibility group for their work, but corporately ADOBE is right up there with the other vendors in playing lip service to accessibility.

Sorry to sound so jaded, but I have now been working in this space for twenty years and I think it is justified.

Ron Stewart

From: athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu<mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu> [mailto:athen-list-bounces at mailman1.u.washington.edu] On Behalf Of Howard Kramer
Sent: Friday, December 13, 2013 4:16 PM
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network
Subject: [Athen] Accessibility of Adobe Acrobat Pro

Hello All:

I would assume at this point that Acrobat Pro would be fully accessible to keyboard and screenreader users. But just wanted to check - what's the current state of its accessibility?

Thanks,
Howard

--
Howard Kramer
Conference Coordinator
Accessing Higher Ground
303-492-8672
cell: 720-351-8668

AHEAD Association of Higher Education and Disability

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