Inflatable Sheep

I'm wrangling over PDFs and accessiblity. I know that you're supposed to have an HTML alternative, but that's not always possible for large PDF files. You can always use Adobe's conversion tool for converting PDFs to text or HTML, but the results of untagged pdfs can be pretty daunting, I imagine, to someone who has a screenreader and has to tab through it all.

Another alternative if your website has a lot of PDFs and you don't have the original file to create a tagged pdf, you can download Adobe Reader 7.0 and have it read aloud the PDF file. I just tried that out today, and it's not a bad alternative.

Just trying to cover all my accessible bases. In the meantime, here are more links to ponder:

• Facts and Opinions About PDF Accessibility by Joe Clark. See also his Predefined PDF Tags.
• Adobe's Creating Accessible PDFs with Acrobat 7.0 (pdf)
• Section 508's Guide to Creating Accessible PDF Documents
• WebAIM’s Defining Acrobat PDF Accessibility