Why blind users are having trouble with PDFs
OUT-LAW Radio, 24/04/2008
We find that few authors of PDFs know how to make them
accessible to blind users
A text transcription follows.
This transcript is for anyone with a hearing impairment or who
for any other reason cannot listen to the MP3 audio file.
The following is the text spoken by OUT-LAW journalist Matthew
Magee.
Hello and welcome to OUT-LAW Radio, the weekly podcast that
keeps you up to date on all the twists and turns in the world of
technology law.
Every week we bring you the latest news and in depth features
that help you to make sense of the ever-changing laws that govern
technology today.
My name is Matthew Magee, and this week ask why blind users are
having trouble with PDFs,
But first, the news:
Google launches street view in Europe
And
Nearly 100 data breaches follow HMRC Gaffe
Google has started recording the streets of its first non-US
city for its Street View service. Google vans with mounted cameras
have been spotted on the streets of Rome and Milan.
Street View is the project which allows Google users to see
photographs of any street in a surveyed area and even travel
through the city, frame by frame.
It has been controversial because of the privacy implications of
publishing images which inevitably contain people or private
property. A lawsuit was filed in the US earlier this year which
alleged that images on the site invaded one couple's privacy.
Europe has stricter privacy safeguards than the US which could
impact on the service once it has been put into operation.
Blog Google Blogoscoped published images last week of cars with
Google logos and roof-mounted cameras in Rome and Milan, but no
confirmation was received from Google about the project at the time
of going to press.
The Information Commissioner has been notified of almost 100
data breaches by public and private sector organisations since the
loss of 25 million people's details by HM Revenue and Customs last
November.
Half of the 28 private sector security breaches were by financial
services companies.
The problem of the loss of personal information gained in
profile in the aftermath of HMRC's loss of two discs containing the
entire register of people claiming child benefit last year. The
information on the discs included names addresses and banking
details of 25 million people, leading to widespread fears of
identity theft.
The cases which have been reported to the ICO include the loss
of whole computers, USB memory sticks containing data and computer
discs containing unencrypted data. Paper records have also gone
missing, and the information on all these formats has included
financial records, health records and other personal
information.
That was this week's OUT-LAW News.
Whether it's your bank statement, a missive from officialdom, a
scanned document or the programme for your favourite music
festival, the PDF document is ubiquitous.
The adobe technology, whose initials stand for portable document
format, allows a publisher to let you see a facsimile of a piece of
paper exactly as it left him without all the visual mishaps and
reformatting of word processing files or web pages.
When it is important that information or its display is not
changed, a PDF is an ideal option.
They can even be created in a way that makes them accessible to the
kind of screen reading software used by blind people. The trouble
is, not everybody knows that.
We will hear soon from two accessibility experts who say they
almost never come across PDFs which have been made accessible by
their creators, but first we'll hear about a case in point.
When American Express recently revamped its online systems it
changed the way it sent people online banking statements. Instead
of offering people information on plain web pages it started
sending information in PDFs. That's when the trouble started.
One Amex customer suddenly found that his software could no
longer read his statements. He approached the Royal National
Institute for the Blind. Hugh Huddy from the RNIB's accessibility
section takes up his story.
Huddy: A call came in that there was a
problem accessing a bank statement by a blind customer of American
Express. It seemed that it was definitely connected with the way
the PDF document itself had been formatted and created. Well
what actually he is reading does not make sense. He was reading a
PDF, where effectively all of the financial entries had collapsed
out of this grid structure. It was just an unstructured load of
text that he could not tell what associated with what.
The problem is pretty simple. Blind and partially sighted people
use all sorts of technologies to read material on a computer. They
change type colour and size and magnify screens and have software
read out what is on the page.
All of these things are possible with PDFs, but there is a
problem with the software that reads out material. If it is going
to make sense of a complicated document like a bank statement, it
has to understand not just what the words on the screen say, but
what they refer to. The screen reader can be told this by tags.
Huddy: Now what tagging is, it is a kind
of accessibility background layer in your PDF that contains
accessibility information for access technologies like screen
readers and that enables the screen reader to recognise what is a
heading, what is a table, what is a column, what is a piece of
paragraph text, what is a link and all that kind of standard stuff
that you would expect a screen reader to be able to recognise in a
document. So the accessibility layer in the PDF format, providing
it has information in it, will therefore provide access for screen
readers. A great deal is down to the way the author produced
it. Now some of these accessibility problems that are arising
with PDFs are because the author does not know that there are
accessibility features.
So while PDFs are not always accessible, they can certainly be
made so. So how common are accessible PDFs? Think hens' teeth, says
Robin Christopherson, head of accessibility services at Abilitynet,
a charity that works with computers and disabled people. Huddy also
relates his experience.
Christopherson: In my experience because
I am a blind screen reader user, I use Jaws which speaks everything
out to me, 95, 99% of the time when I open up a PDF that someone
sent me or that I have just grabbed from a website, I get a
dialogue that comes up saying this PDF is untagged.
Huddy: It is so common that people
publish inaccessible PDFs that I very rarely find ones that are
tagged for accessibility at the moment. I have PDFs sent to me on a
daily basis by disabled people who say, Is it me or is it this PDF?
It is almost always the PDF that has accessibility problems.
So American Express is far from alone, but that does not help
its customer. He was offered alternatives such as Braille
statements, but Huddy said that he was unhappy with an option that
did not give him the same immediate information as online
statements did.
American Express declined to be interviewed but did send us a
statement about the case. It said:
Amex statement: "Whilst we were updating our website we
changed some of the settings which meant that those cardmembers
with sight issues could not access their statements. We have now
put the settings back so statements can be accessed by these
cardmembers. We have apologised for any inconvenience caused and
would like to clarify that we offered a number of alternatives to
blind cardmembers such as large print statements, Braille and
CD-Rom versions while the issue was being resolved."
Huddy said that the man in question is in consultation with the
RNIB's lawyers about the possibility of action under the disability
discrimination act.
The problems, he said, come when blind or partially sighted
users are being offered a degraded service.
Huddy: Let's not forget this customer has
previously been online banking and reading their statements and now
since December has not been able to read their statements online.
This is a serious problem for them as in this is a serious problem
for the customer because not only do they have a right to read this
information but it is part of the service. It is what they signed
up for.
There is disappointment amongst advocates of equal treatment
that all the promise of digital technologies is not being
fulfilled. Huddy again.
Huddy: The significant thing here is that
online banking is a revolution for people with disabilities. We all
have heard that the internet is a great leveller and it is the
greatest for accessibility or the greatest access to information
revolution that there has been and some of the greatest benefactors
from these changes in our modern digital society have been disabled
people, especially blind people.
Christopherson says that some users have already taken
organisations to task over their grievances.
Christopherson: They certainly do not
have to lump it. There is obviously the DDA that they can
have recourse to. There is the DED the Disability Equality Duty
that has even come on the public sector. So there is legislation
and because there has not been that many high profile cases, it
does not mean that there is not litigation flying around. There are
organisations that have been approached, you know, challenged by
end-users and it some cases that has gone right through to settling
out of court. And PDFs I am sure are part of the grievance part of
the issue that people have with particular sights.
So what should organisations do to avoid this? Obviously, make
sure that if you use PDFs the information in them is properly
tagged, but Christopherson advises considering other formats
entirely.
Christopherson: There are other preferred
formats. Word for example. The reading order almost by definition
would be okay. And HTML obviously web pages and that sort of thing
are much slimmer. They are much more responsive, often depending on
the spec of the people's machines. People are more familiar with
navigating around in a browser on a web page for example than in a
PDF document.
That's all we have time for this week, thank you for
listening.
Why not get in touch with Out-law Radio? Do you know of a
technology law story? We'd love to hear from you on Radio@OUT-LAW.com. Make sure you
tune in next week; for now, goodbye.
OUT-LAW Radio was produced and presented by Matthew Magee for
international law firm Pinsent Masons.
