A Valuable Resource for Accessible PDF
I’m often asked “Hey, when is the PDF/UA Committee going to tell us what exactly constitutes accessible PDF is and how we get there?” I don’t have an answer for this question, yet. I can tell you that we are working on timelines now - stay tuned.
In the interim, I’d like to offer, with the kind permission of the author, Adobe Systems’ Greg Pisocky, his guide to Creating Accessible PDFs using Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional, now hosted on the Document Solutions, Inc. website. (Full Disclosure)
IMHO, Adobe themselves should host this document at their Accessibility Resource Center, because it’s the best Adobe publication on the subject to-date. Until they do, however, we’ll just try to help out a little.
October 25th, 2006 at 10:36 am
I don’t know if this is the right blog or not but I need help. I have a pdf that is 13 pages and 1.75 meg. It was made in word by clicking the pdf icon and also by printing to distiller, both ways and in acrobat 5 and acrobat 6.
My problem is I have a link on web page to it to open but will not open (it did previously and now won’t). I get the following error: “A file I/O error has occurred. The file connection has times out.”
Other pdf’s open fine (smaller), just this one and I have no idea why.
I talked to web hosting and they say acrobat problem.
Can you please help with this.
Thanks,
Alex
November 7th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
Alex,
It’s hard to say… an “i/o error” in this case is weird. First of all, your link will DEFINATELY go away if you print to Distiller… that’s not usually a good idea. In that case, of course, all the links in your file will be bad.
If the link is good in the Word file (which you should check), it should be good in PDF if you did use the PDFMaker (the icon in Word) to create the file. There are a few possibilities… such as a “bad” line-break somehow screwing up the link.
Try recreating the file again with the PDFMaker button. Also, try altering the Word file to put the link on a single line. Let me know how it goes!
Duff Johnson