Let’s get some reality on the web accessibility debate.

We all know about WCAG 1, we have all at least had a look at the associated checklists.  If you are lucky you may have glanced at WCAG 2.

We all have been developing and designing our sites with semantic content, in compliance with W3C guidelines, using progressive enhancement for the interactive components, unobtrusive Javascript, and graceful degradation of the pages for legacy browsers.   Maybe used some of the attributes of ARIA. Sure that’s a no brainer.

We know that doing this will solve most of the accessibility issues.

So much so that one would think that the cause for accessibility and universal design was over.  Right?

No – wrong.

We are not Assistive Technology users

If we set aside the fact that we still have people in Australia building non standards based sites with tables for layout and inline javascript.

We as a community (edit – able bodied) in general are just paying lip service to accessibility.  We have become complacent. We are engaging in a mindless tokenistic effort with accessibility.  Do we really care…

Often the real answer is No.  At least now we are being honest.

Think about it when was the last time you included a round of accessibility testing in a quote.   Or for that matter when was the last time you even considered it, or even raised the topic.

To often if the client does bring up accessibility in early discussions, we will just ignore it.  Pretend it isn’t an issue.

Even government agencies, local, state and federally, have been dodging accessibility issues.  I have seen it personally, straight faced lies, or statements of avoidance veiled in bureaucratic misunderstanding.   The mindless ticking off on the WCAG 1 checklist, just to get the KPI achieved, too often by a junior staff member who doesn’t really have any interest in accessibility or the like anyway.

This has to stop.

Yes some of us are doing something, but in reality is it enough.

Are we calling our fellow peers to task when the accessibility on their web site is just not up to scratch?  We used to do this with  web standards.  Why not accessibility?

Maybe we need to remind people that ensuring a web site is accessible in Australia is a legal requirement.

Losing our way.

Still with accessibility we have gone very quiet.  Even silent.  Why?

Simple we have become our clients, we are now just playing the same lip service, tokenism game that our clients are often playing.   Yes in public we (they) will state that we care about accessibility.   But in reality we (edit – as able bodied designers and developers) don’t have to use assistive technology (AT), we don’t have a disability, in general we can see and use the web as it was intended.  We are a million miles from the practical world of using AT.

The old UX catch call is never truer here – we are not the users.   The disparity between us and the people we are really working for, with accessibility, is sometimes just too great for us to even get a idea of what it is like, no matter how many videos of people using assitive technology we see.

Why we are doing nothing.

In a lot of cases we have the tools with the standard issue Web Technology to make the entire web accessible. We have had them for over 4 years now.  Still a lot of sites fail all but a basic Jaws reading test.  Why?

We know why, we just don’t talk about it, it’s the elephant in the room:

• Money

  Money is the primary issue.  It’s always  comes down to money, it costs for testing, it costs for recruiting, it costs to find the best solution.

• No ROI

  From the clients view there is a perception that there is no return on investment.  The AT audience is just too small and they are seen as being just on welfare and not having any disposable income at all.

• Lack of Skills

  There is a lack of skills or documented solutions for all but the common accessibility issues.  Yes lots of people around the world have found solutions to most of the problems.   However if you want to solve it locally you have to reinvent the solution again or call in an overseas or interstate high paid consultant.

• Social Value

  In reality there is no socially inspired public relations value in accessibility.  A business can be seen to get more value out of sponsoring a guide dog than making their web site accessible.

• Why Bother

  Although the Australia Human Rights Commission hasn’t been sitting on it’s hands on these issues. There is a general public and web industry perception that they have. So if the legislator isn’t bothered with enforcing compliance why should anyone else care.

• Lack of Tools

  There is no sure-fire tool that we can automatically measure accessibility of a site.  It takes real testing and a compliance checklist to ensure a site is accessibility to a wide spectrum of the community.   It’s much easier to just lie on the checklist, after all who is going to check.  Yes I have seen this being done time after time.

What can we do.

It’s a sad really.  In a way we shouldn’t have even got to this state.

It’s as if the hard battle for accessibility has only been won on the popularist visually impaired front.  Leaving the cognitive, motor control, hearing and the like issues out in the cold.

Now I don’t have a solution, however this is something I have been thinking about a great deal.

I’m certain what every we have to do, isn’t going to be one simple solution.  On a side note: don’t look to HMTL5, that’s not going to be the magical panacea.  I except  the answer will be in a multiple pronged approach:

• Kill off Accessibility

  In some ways even considering accessibility as a separate item is the wrong approach. We really need to be considering the ideals of universal design, in which everything is designed for everyone.   Let’s just for a minute forget about accessibility as a separate issue. We need to design and develop for people using AT just like we do for any other usability issue.  This is where  Inclusive Design comes in.

• No more checklists

  Lets be honest the WCAG checklists  don’t work. We don’t have HTML or CSS checklists.   Why should we have accessibility ones.   Checklists are just too open to management and insecure web team members abusing them and warping the real results.  After all who is going to challenge or randomly audit them – senior management, I don’t think so.

• Merge the Guidelines

  Over time it would be idea to merge WCAG in the core of HTML and CSS guidelines such that it is just second nature to the recommended implementation examples with HTML or CSS.   Okay this is a really long term solution considering we are just getting into HTML5.

• Ninja Accessibility

  Being realistic we aren’t going to get all those ideas of the ground tomorrow.  However we can take advantage of the aging baby boomer population in the west.  This generation of older adults, will start to have a lot of leverage and will also start to encounter  a number of minor web accessibility issues.  Via overcoming these issues by stealth, ninja like, one is able to introduce an inclusive design mind set to the client, via an area they can relate to.

• Accessibility Patterns

  This is one that I touched on above.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a centralised library of accessibility solutions, a bit like a UI pattern library like Yahoo User Interface Library or  the Yahoo Design Pattern Library.  That way designers and developers could just look for a solution to a problem or just consider the overall UI recommended in terms of an inclusive design.    Either way it would be a win, win situation.

  Now there are lots of very smart accessibility design practitioners across the world.  I know a good number of them have encountered most of the common issues and then some more.  Some have published these issues and the work arounds as they discover them.  Some have just listed the issue and test results, leaving the solution as a guarded revenue stream.  And others are just too busy to really contribute.

  We need to harness this information and store it somewhere centrally.   As a community resource.   Think about it, think about the differences that developmental patterns and UI design patterns have made to the developmental process. No more reinventing the wheel (or widget) .  They have allowed the adoption of a landscape where good practices are now the norm.

  What we need to do is foster the accessibility community to build accessibility patterns as solutions to common problems.   Such that any designer or developer can drop the solution in place and be confident of the out come.   Yes this does need some altruistic contributions back to the community by accessibility solution specialists.  However just consider the overall result in the longer term.

In a way I have dream that in the next five years we can turn this around and have  accessibility issues approached in the same way we now do for web standards.

However in order to do this we need to start today, and make real changes in what we do.

Are you with me!

You know in accessibility circles we are constantly telling people using drop down CSS menus that when the menus are not visible  we shouldn’t be using display:none to achieve this.   We all know this one, right.  Just to refresh your memory, remember the display:none rule takes an element assigned right out of the picture completely,  for anyone using a screen reader the assigned content will just not “exist”.

This is all well and good.  Well that depends, maybe there is a case for the use of display:none afterall.

Sometimes we forget about the bigger picture, about the people we are building the sites for.  A few weeks ago at the UPA Perth (chapter in formation) meeting, Teressa from the Disability Services Commission demonstrated with her screen reader (JAWS) why the display:none is sometimes a good thing.

The Issue

Normally for a drop down menu you would code it as a unordered list as below, note I have removed the links for clarity:

<ul class="menu">
        <li>Home</li>
        <li>Products
           <ul class="submenu">
               <li>Sexy Product </li>
               <li>Highest Selling Product</li>
               <li>Mega Cool Product</li>
           </ul>
        </li>
        <li>Services</li>
        <li>About</li>
        <li>Contact</li>
</ul>

And you would use CSS menu based techniques (with a little Javascript for legacy browsers) to generally display the lower  menu (assigned the class submenu on the unordered list).  It follows before the menu is activated it would be hidden from view with the use of the following CSS that still makes the submenu content readable to a screen reader.

.submenu {
    position: absolute; 
    left: -10000px;
    top:-10000px;
 }

For those who are not familiar,  this rule pushes the element outside of the normal document flow visually – to the far left and up beyond the normal visual screen.  However it is still on the virtual screen, so it can be read by a screen reader.

It follows then that a screen reader will be able read all the menu items even the lower level ones and hence the user can transverse at their will round such a menu system.   Which is a good outcome, right?

The Downside – Information Overload

However consider not just a simple menu system (above), but say one from a government agency  consisting of  maybe hundreds of items.  Now think about  having to transverse such a menu.  To deal with those hundreds of items being read out.  As Teressa put it -”It’s just information overload”.

Unknowingly we have subjected our users with disabilities to a massive amount of information that even we are not subjected to.   You see even we see the the menus in chunks, bite sized pieces that we can mentally digest as they appear on a mouse or keyboard action.

The Solution

It’s really a simple thing to fix.  We just use display:none to hide all these large lower menu systems as required.  This means that they are no longer visible to the screen reader at all.  Which is exactly what we want.

.submenu {
     display:none;
 }

To supplement this what we should be doing is using progressional enhancement of the navigational system.  At the very least we should be  having the relevant  sub menus presented on the parent page or related sibling pages as a separate menu list.   This way anyone with disabilities or the like using just the top level menu buttons will still be able to navigate around the site.

So when we have way too much information on the CSS menu, maybe it’s time to consider an  alternative and remove it from the sight of the screen readers altogether. Forcing the navigation of the site by the regular page by page chunks of the menu navigation.

As you would expect this all comes down to testing with real people, people with the disabilities that you are finding solutions for.  You see sometimes with all the good intentions we think we are doing the right thing, but it turns out to be otherwise.

So what instances of disability best practice have you found to be a hinderance to people with a disability?

The Australian Web Industry Association is doing it again.  Putting on one of those must go to educational web events.  This one goes under the moniker of Ideas 5.

They are having an evening of discussions with leading Australian accessibility experts Roger Hudson and Andrew Downie.   Roger will be giving the low down on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Version 2 (WCAG 2), while Andrew will be presenting some practical advice on PDF Accessibility.   There is also the usual round of networking with your web industry peers and a cash bar.

When: Wednesday 22nd April, from 7:00pm

Where: The Melbourne Hotel, 942 Hay Street, Perth

Cost: $40 for AWIA Members

Now if you are fully up to date, you will know that WCAG 2 has been ratified by the W3C, but it yet to be adopted here in Australia.  However I can say that it is very close to happening.   So this event would be an ideal time to get your brain space around the new accessibility guidelines.

Okay I know there is lot of PDF use out there as a cheap web publishing means, so it would also be a good idea to also come along and see first hand what type of issues that our bad PDF documents are causing accessibility wise on the web.   So you get two must see events for one!  Cool, eh.

Now what you waiting for go on, go get a ticket, yes right now. I hope to see you at Ideas5 to learn all about WCAG 2, PDF Accessibility and to have a drink or two.

In a few weeks there is going to be the biggest web event of the Western Australian calendar year. Not just the Edge of the Web conference, there is also Webjam, four workshops and the WA Web Awards all in one roller coaster week.

One of the keynote speakers and workshop presenter at the Edge of the Web conference is Derek Featherstone. Derek is particularly renown for his straight forward and often enlightening approach to accessibility.

The other day I took the opportunity to discuss with Derek his motivation, the future of accessibility and his forthcoming workshop.

MWNB:

You were recently in Australia for Web Directions South 2008, last month, and previous to that in 2006, and 2005. And now in a few weeks you are making the trip back down to Australia for the Edge of the Web. So what is it really about Australia that makes it so attractive, or are you just returning to get more triathlon tips?

DF:

Since my first trip down under in 2005, I’ve just wanted more and more! The timing always seems perfect – just as we’re starting to turn cold here at home (Ottawa, Canada) – I get to sneak away for a while to the beautiful weather. And, now that I’ve been there for several trips, it really does feel like another home. I’m always welcomed by wonderful people that are really switched on to accessibility, user experience and the web in general. For me, it was a no-brainer to accept the invitation to EOTW.

MWNB:

Recently, in Australia at least, there has been a lot of promotion and discussion on accessibility. To the point that in many circles the case for considering accessibility appears to have been won, allowing web designers and developers alike to relax their guard. This is turn has allowed the government and corporate sector to fall back on believing that accessibility issues are no longer important at all. Given Australia’s soft legislative approach to accessibility how does one get it back on the corporate agenda.

DF:

The case for considering accessibility appears to have been won

I’m not sure this is the case at all. I mean, we all say we consider it, but what do we actually do about it. Yes, I’ll admit that in many cases, the battle for “old school” accessibility may have been won, and there are scores of people that put that into practice every single day. But — we need to keep plugging away to move things beyond consideration into action. And – as we continue to innovate on the web, so too, we must with accessibility.

Getting it back on the corporate agenda might be somewhat difficult – I suspect a lot of people think they’re already doing accessibility really well. However, if we simply ask them if their innovations in accessibility are keeping up with the rest of the innovations they are pushing, I think a lot of people will answer that it hasn’t.

MWNB:

Within web application development circles there is a slow
movement off the corporate intranet of RIA systems into the web space. Traditionally this has been seen as a bad thing in terms of accessibility, as Flash and Silverlight have always been seen as the
evil ugly sister in terms of accessibility. But of late there seems to be a change in this perception in terms of accessibility. So is RIA the future over HTML?

DF:

Ah, to have a crystal ball

For certain contexts, both now and in the forseeable future, HTML of some sort is a perfectly capable format. For documents, certainly, and even simple web applications, what we have now works, and works quite well.

It can easily be argued that more interactive technologies such as Flash and Silverlight hold much promise and can be much more usable than the most static and traditional HTML format. E-learning and data visualization experiments are prime examples of how these technologies can be used to help communicate our messages in an engaging and interactive way to everyone.

There are loads of great examples of how these technologies come together to create interactive narratives at (the aptly named) http://www.interactivenarratives.org. The site was founded by Andrew DeVigal, who currently serves as the multimedia editor of The New York Times. The work he has done there is brilliant in terms of how it
engages the person viewing the site. What if we could take that same approach to web applications and create an immersive means to interact with data and with each other?

Yes. I’d still like that crystal ball, please.

MWNB:

Over the last two years the relevancy of the W3C and all it’s
forcoming guidelines has been drawn into question, time and time again. Of note in this area in terms of accessibility are the upcoming WCAG 2 and WAI-ARIA, are you confident these two are going
to make any impact at all.

DF:

Yes, actually, I am.

WCAG 2 takes a big step forward to provide guidance for making things accessible that aren’t necessarily HTML. It will help with creating accessible PDFs, Silverlight, Flash, and other technologies that are yet to come. For that reason alone, I’m excited about WCAG 2 — its technology agnostic approach will help developers meet accessibility needs.

Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) has been in the works for some time, and we’re finally seeing support in mainstream browsers and assistive technologies. I’ll be perfectly honest – we needed it to be ready about three years ago, so when it finally does come about, it’ll be most welcome. It is a missing piece to the puzzle of accessible RIAs right now, so I’m very happy to see continued progress on that front.

MWNB:

While you are in Australia next month you are presenting a workshop at the Edge of the Web. Hat tip by the way for your Web Directions Workshop. Is this workshop going to be the usual cold theory of accessibility 101 that we have seen trotted out by various accessibility consultants over the years or will it be different and have that “Featherstone” magic.

DF:

I’m ecstatic you enjoyed the full-day version in Sydney at Web Directions South — the workshop I’m doing at EOTW will be the same core content in a half-day. Our goal is to share experiences, ideas and solutions with designers and developers so that they can walk away with concepts and techniques that help them question their practices and those of their teams. Definitely not Accessibility 101, and hopefully magic!

MWNB:

Thanks Derek and I’ll see you at the Edge of the Web.

So if you are interested in accessibility or just feel you need to learn a little more on this critical subject, I would be getting along to Derek’s keynote Journey to the Edge of the Web and workshop Real World Accessibility for Ajax and Web Apps on the Edge of the Web.

Well the ISO standard ISO 13407 – the International Standard for Human Centred Design (gets a new number too! – ISO 9241-210) is being side shuffled it seems. Now it’s a standard for User Experience. Is this a good thing?

What is User Experience, really! Well for me it’s all the aspect of the front end user interaction, the emotional response to use the page, the effective usefulness, the accessibility, the audience’s perception of credibility of the site and the directive of the user towards the site’s goal. Usability (ISO 9241-11: Guidance on Usability) on the other hand is just an narrow aspect of this entire user experience

Seems that Tom Stewart agrees with me on the definitions and to top this off the ISO people feel that the standard is more about the experience than the ease of use. Fair call.

So we are basically cranking the entire process with an User Experience focus. I suppose the aim here is that business overall, not just the big players, will adopt the general aspect of UX and make it the core of their developmental and design process. One only hopes, I don’t see it happening around here too quick, but that’s another post, eh.

For some people this will just be a semantics over the term being used. So by Monday morning I expect all you usability consultants to fully up to speed with being UX consultants .

The other day I was floored and humbled as I regularly am during a session of usability testing for a site prototype. Up to this point the testing and functionality determination had gone well. Then someone put a massive road block in the way. There it was sticking up out of the ground blocking all findability of the core information on a site. Well maybe it wasn’t that bad, but it did make me think; which is good.

The Persona

Part of the root of the problem was the demographic of the main user segment’s persona. They where mainly low technology users, with extremely low computer use, but still significant use when required for certain tasks. This computer use was often their own time. Their work was very linear in nature with little room for any abstracted cognitive reasoning.

The Problem

Now we all assume you know how to use a select list (like below). You click on the arrow and select an item or tab, open and select.

But consider when the user doesn’t go near the select list, or will only use the default highlighted select. To them the out of sight items are hidden, invisible. They just can’t visually make the leap that the select list is in fact a number of selection items.

Hence all select lists, search or browse filters are deemed void.

The Solution

It’s really simple to fix, we thought, this one is just a matter of education, people will nut it out. But then the first time user is lost, what then. So out churned the solutions:

• We tried check boxes. They where partly successful, but if the checked state was presented as a “cross” then the user did a reverse selection to what they really desired.
• Next we tried a open, multiple line selection box, this worked when you could see the items they required. Otherwise it failed.
• Finally we ended up with a simple list of links (see below) to represent the items concerned. With this the users had not problem and progressed as expected.

The key here was the user demographic, and that you should assume nothing. So what show stoppers like this have you come against and how did you get around them?

Jordan Brock kindly videoed the two talks presented by Lisa and Rachel, encoded and uploaded them to Vimeo.

Rachel Cook, despite being 8 month pregnant, amused us all with tales of Silicon Valley and web 2.0 startups.

Ideas 4 – Rachel Cook at Ideas4 on Vimeo.

Where as Lisa Herrod on her birthday trekked all the way from the East Coast to present on holistic usability and accessibility with Usability More Than Skin Deep, Proving that checklist help but real people should be part of the equation.

Ideas 4 – Lisa Herrod at Ideas4 on Vimeo.

Thanks go to both Rachel and Lisa. You really made for an awesome evening.

I’ve noticed this over the last say 18 to 12 months, things are changing in the web community. There are still the usual arguments between people and various factional groups. That’s nothing new there. No it’s something more. It’s like a complacency, that we have all fought hard and that the war is over and we can live now in a golden age. The voices of leadership seem to be dropping away, not being as potent or vocal as they once where. Molly Holzschlag has seen it to, and again call people to arms, I seem to remember Molly doing this before recently.

So is there a problem, why do we not give a damn anymore. It seems as if people are not caring about standards, that the good guys (us) are losing out time and time again to the bad guys (the non standards posse). Things like table layouts, bad ajax implementations and accessibility being an unaffordable option are common place. What the hell happened!

I’ll tell you a simple story of a web community, it grew from islands of individuals with ideas and dreams to a friendly, cooperative and spirited community. It took it’s time to get to this stage, but it did get there. The people in the community where young vibrant, free of responsibility, free to focus on the web and it’s needs. The community saw that previous leaders, that had aspired them in the first place, where not forefilling their dreams they had promised. So they tool theire leader’s dream the turned it inwards and educated their own on the needs for standards, usability and accessibility. And for a while it was good. Now time has passed, but something has gone wrong. The fire in the belly, the vibrant spirit was gone. And the new crop of youngsters won’t listen to their experience.

Nice story. So where is the problem, well its not that simple, it’s not one thing, it’s several:

• Changing of the guard

  A while back Kevin Lawver stepped down from the CSS Working Group freely admitting that time was the main issue. Fantasa also points out that people like Andy Clarke have been too busy to contribute as well. This got me thinking since then. Most of these groups are run by volunteers, who give up their own personal time to contribute to the web community at large. Now there does come a point where in everyones life where you have other responsibilities (work, family, business or personal matters) that will eat into any time you have for volunteer work. Look at the age of these people that are stepping aside or paring down their contributions. This is a changing of the guard. It’s just we may not have mentored up the young people to take our place.

  Maybe people have been to busy playing at being Web Rock Gods . These people will not be gone forever. But if you want them to stay on the fringes and have them lend a guiding hand from time to time, then we need to let them step aside. It’s just we are seeing it happen on mass.

• Community gone wrong

  Maybe we are just being overwhelmed by a vocal minority. An example in point is the my local web standards mailing list. To be honest I have given up reading each post on this list or even posting (which is bad, I know) . I just cherry pick now. Why? Well the conversation is the same, and at times very condescending towards perceived new list members, read people that don’t post a lot. I don’t post a lot. Does this make me a newbie. Do I feel obliged to join the conversation, well no not anymore. Don’t get me wrong there are some wonderful community building people on this list. Then there are the divisionalists.

  The extreme view of this is the WHATWG members on the W3C HTML list, this is a classic example. There are two lists 1) WHATWG by HTML5 and 2) HTML5 by W3C with it seems overlapping members with two distinct agendas from the WHATWG camp. I worry do we have two drafts of HTML5, I hope not. With this the simplification of HTML5 by WHATWG seems in my view a step back into the back days of 1996. Are we about to erase all the blood sweat and tears just because of some noisy minority, I hope not. Questions need to be asked is WHATWG planning to make accessibility and semantics ‘irrelevant’ as they are too hard to implement.

  Doesn’t take much for an interested fringe group to move their agenda forward and take control. So in away we (yes you and me) need to be the voice of sanity. We need to voice our concerns little by little and support each other. Maybe someone will listen.

• Ignore it, it will go away

  Are people playing the three wise monkeys. Totally frustrated by it all. Trying to ignore it all in a vain hope all the evil will just go away. Is there just too much in the way of RIA, bad ajaxification that is destroying accessibility just as we appear to getting accessibility and standards into the right perspectives. Are the back room coders now getting their revenge on us the minority standard zealots. With all this wave of Web2.0 craziness, are we just stunned at the entire scope of the problem, not knowing where to start.

• We are all over worked

  I don’t know about you but working in the web industry at the moment is just insane. The work level in the past twelve months has gone from busy to extremely busy. Again if people are very busy then they just don’t get time to read lists, forums, blogs etc, they just get by on the edge of burnout. And even those with a lack of aging responsibility are effected by this one. This leaves it to a minority again. Will this pass, yes it will as night follows day.

So what do you think, is there a slow down in the support for the old ways put forth circa 2000 (standards et al) or is it just a changing of the guard and the program will return to normal after the usual chaotic settling in period. You know I think it’s little of each for everyone.

Technorati Tags: html5, w3c, whatwg, web+standards, web+community, RIA, AJAX, volunteer

You know the story. Your client or boss wants to put a report online, it’s just a few pages long, but they want exact print output control of the document or they just want to ensure that the cost is kept to a minimum. So you end up putting the document online as a PDF. Now I ask you is it really readable by everyone. That is normal viewers, assistative technology viewers, search engine bots and viewers in remote areas on slow connections. I can bet that in most cases one of these groups is missing out

So you ignore the problems and just get the job done and get the PDF online. If you have been in the industry for a while you would have done this. Yes even I a have done this, shame on me. Come on, I bet you have too. Well I’m going to discuss how to get over some of the problems you will have created with PDF distribution of information on the Web.

Suitability of PDFs – when to use them

I’m a business realist; I know there are times that you have to use a PDF. But let’s have a close look at the times you should use a PDF the and times you shouldn’t.

When to use

• Large reports, papers, documents
• Books or book chapters
• Legal or procedural forms intended to be printed.

When not to use

• Short brochures and specification sheets (include a HTML version of the information)
• Product catalogue pictures and brochures (or consider an online catalogue)
• Short one of two page documents. These should be in HTML.

The Acrobat distribution problem

There is generally not a major problem with version control of the PDF reader. In that previous versions of the reader can read the base features of the new versions (as long as the security features aren’t activated. However there is one version where all bets are off, as there is a distinct problem.

If you have been working with PDF a while you would have come across this error:

Error: Database: corrupt database

First off you think, hang on – where are the database within a PDF. But there are several data tables of information within a PDF if you think about it. I have found from experience that this only tends to occur if the document is being read by Acrobat reader below version 5.02.

Problem is there are a lot of computers in the corporate world; especially government, that still have Acrobat Readers that are version 5.0. It seems there was massive push with distribution of version 5.0 This was for Adobe a double edged sword. As this leaves them with a large number of corrupt readers that would nor read version 7+ files. The release of the voluntary patch to 5.01 and 5.02 was frankly a waste of time as it’s well know that IT sections don’t apply non operating systems patches. Hence till the OS is updated the problem remains for most corporate users.

Or does it? Try removing some of the accessibility settings when you make the PDF. The main one in case is the “Enable accessibility and reflow with Tagged PDF”. You will find this under Settings, in the Application Settings section. Ensure it is NOT checked. That’s right I know it’s insane but uncheck it.

Of course the other alternative is to get the user to upgrade to version 7 or above. Good luck with that. So here is a classic case of good distribution can come back to bite you. But what do you do with Quark or InDesign created documents. Well I don’t have a solution for that case, yet.

Optimisation

You have a PDF it’s well over 5 Meg in size and you really want it to be about 1 Meg or less. So how do you get it smaller? You have tried the optimise settings in Acrobat, but still it’s just way too big. First things first, you may have to have the PDF rebuild. There are a lot of things that we as designers do, in our rush to get the job done, that make the resultant PDF, as a vector based document, bloat to an unworkable size. Here is a short list of things you can do to make the document smaller file size wise.

Using InDesign

• Check the InDesign files for hidden images or vector shapes. You are looking for things that are hidden under other layered images or objects. Look for items off to the side of the Layout, this is still placed in the PDF, if its not required remove it.
• If you have an image that has a mask over it within InDesign, there can be wasted pixels there. You need to redo the image so that it is clipped or cropped as close as you can get it to the mask edge. As the complete image is rendered underneath the mask layer in the PDF even if you only see 10% of it.
• Ensure all gradients are vector generated and not bitmap images (Tiff, Jpeg etc). This is especially true of that groovy Illustrator gradient you are just been working on; in this case render them as a true vector EPS file and place this into InDesign.
• Use Jpegs that are optimised instead of Tiffs. Jpegs have a smaller initial footprint.
• Use pictures that have large blocks of the same colour in them and not great amounts of detail or different colours. Bright and colourful is often better.
• Use black and white or duo tone images.
• Use Adobe smart object when you can for cross platform object they seem to help a little, especially in CS2. The compression on Smart Object is very good for some reason (I have no idea why).
• Then export file as PDF, assuming you have all the accessibility tags in place too.

Using MS-Word

• Optiumise all images as if you are doing it for the web before you insert them into the word document

Using Acrobat

Now start work in Acrobat, use the PDF Optimiser tool under Advanced > PDF Optimizer. Remember to save versions of your file as you optimise. Things to consider while optimising:

• Select Flatten transparency
• Clip complex regions
• Don’t disable embedded fonts unless you really have to. You still want you typography to remain as you designed it.
• Down sample the images step by step, soon as you notice a difference at a glance take the previous version, you have optimised too much
• Remember to clean up any referenced structure elements like bookmarks that are not referencing the pages in the document. This is important if you are chopping a document into different chapters.
• Don’t ever try and combine two documents together or build a document from separate InDesign page exports it will always be a lot larger than the single run InDesign export.

Searchable PDFs

Yes Google and most search engines will index your PDFs. But please ensure you do a few things to help them along. It does help if you complete the Metadata section of the Description tab in the PDF (Ctrl-D) :

• Complete the Title field, this becomes the link text
• The Subject field, this maybe become the description depends on the search engine and the version of PDF.
• The keyword (delimited with semi colons)

You should if you have the time consider completing the Additional Metadata section of this dialog. You can import and export these via an xml file. This will give you a better metadata footprint, and is very handy if you are doing a lot of documents with a standard baseline of metadata.

Now the really interesting bit, did you know up to till version 7 Adobe has produced a different method of presenting the metadata within the file format for nearly every version of Acrobat. In version 6 it is presented in version 5 format and version 6 formats, just to make life interesting. In Version 7+ we have an enhanced version 6 format. Luckily a well written search bot can tell what version the PDF document is written in. Version 8 follows the version 7 format for the most part.

Accessible PDFs

I’m not going to go into a great detail on this, but the bottom line is all the accessibility must occur in almost all cases before you create the PDF. You can do it afterwards, but it does tend to more time consuming the later in the process you add in the accessibility.

Pre Production – MS Word

• Ensure that the document structure is written in using the Heading styles
• That a table of contents is defined,
• That all images and diagrams have an alternative text defined.
• That all links have an screen tip text defined
• With tables that all header rows are check under Table Properties as “Repeat as Header Row at top of each page”
• Ensure the colour contrast is readable for extremes in contrast and colour blindness. Light grey on white is not a contrasting colour scheme.

Pre Production – InDesign

• You have to tag the document either via File Export or by turning on tagging by default for all exported files are tagged. You do this via File > Adobe PDF Presets > Define and click on the presets you want to be tagged and check Create Tagged PDF . If you are doing a high quality print this is the default anyway, but it’s a good idea to check.
• When building the document you need to define headers (semantic structures) that use styles that have the right names, that is h1 to h6. Nothing else, use exactly h1 to h6.
• Check the Structure Panel to ensure you are progressing well with the semantic structure.
• Add alterative text to images, right click the image tag in the Structure Panel and selecting New Attribute. Add “Alt” in the name field (note capital A) and the alternative text in the value field.
• Links and lists will have to be edited post production. Although this may have changed with InDesign CS3.

Post Production – Acrobat

• Ensure the fonts have not been rasterised (scanned), check, you must be able to copy the text at least.
• Use Acrobat 7 or above for the base line, JAWS and other assistative technology may have issues with anything below version 7.
• You can add tags to the document via the Acrobat, but it is not an easy issue, it will take time to complete. View the tags by selecting View > Navigation Tags > Tags.
• If there are no tags, select Advanced > Accessibility > Add tags to Document, to add them
• Select the Content Tab and use the right click on the structure elements to edit the accessibility elements.
• Within the Touchup Properties dialogue remember to use the Tag tab and fill in the elements required there.
• Build the bookmarks structure in the Bookmarks tab for the document via Acrobat. This just takes time.
• Build the thumbnails in the Pages tab. Don’t forget, to set the Page Properties (right mouse click) to Use Document Structure.

Summary

PDFs are not just simple build, link and upload document format. If you must use them, use with caution and optimise and make them accessible at all times. Suddenly you will find that quick fix by using a PDF, isn’t really that much of a quick fix after all.

These are the notes from the mini talk “PDF is not your Friend” I gave at the Perth July 2007 Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA) Meeting. There is a podcast and the slides are available as a PDF document (852 k), on slideshare or below.

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