[Athen] article advocating for PDFs in College & Research Libraries News

[Steve Green]

Of course I know about maths/STEM. It was the sentence construction that I didn’t understand – it doesn’t make sense. If you interpret it as meaning “advocating for PDF is presently equivalent to advocating that STEM articles do not need to be accessible” then I would agree with it. But that’s not what I am advocating.

I advocate using the most appropriate document format for the content type, audience and use case. HTML is usually the best, but not always. PDF is usually second best, but there are things it can’t do. Word is usually the worst choice (other than ODF and PowerPoint), but it can do a few things that you can’t do in HTML or PDF. It’s important that authors understand the abilities and limitations of all these formats and use them appropriately.

Unless someone works in a very narrow field, it is unlikely that any one document format will be the most appropriate for every document they produce. If they use Word for all documents, it’s likely to be a sub-optimal choice for some of them.

Steve


From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf Of Susan Kelmer
Sent: 12 September 2022 14:53
To: Access Technology Higher Education Network <athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: [Athen] article advocating for PDFs in College & Research Libraries News

Steve said:

I don’t even understand what you mean by “advocating for PDF is presently equivalent to advocating that no STEM articles are accessible”. As I have already said several times, the accessibility of a PDF is at least as good as the source document and usually better.

You have not researched enough.  Math/STEM cannot be presented accessibly in PDF. It is only visually presented, which is not accessible.


Susan Kelmer
Alternate Format Production Program Manager
Disability Services
Health and Wellness Services
T 303 735 4836
www.colorado.edu/disabilityservices<http://www.colorado.edu/disabilityservices>


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