>
> P.S.  I'm worried when Kelly says that "the accessible PDF
> is still going to take a lot of work on the part of the person
> creating the source document."  If that is true, PDF is a lost
> cause for accessibility.  It is hard enough getting people to
> make their web sites accessible.
>

John,

  The ultimate solution is for authoring tools to generate accessible PDF (just as they should generate accessible HTML or XML). The document at http://access/adobe/com/AccessGuide.pdf describes the current paths for generating accessible PDF files. I trust the list of authoring tools will grow over time.

  And I concede that hand-tweaking PDF files is potentially a lot of work, and, worse yet, work that has to be repeated if the PDF file is regenerated. But some things, like adding Alt tags, aren't hard.

  On the plus side, Acrobat 5 does a much better job of presenting the information in legacy PDF files to the screen reader. It will handle multiple columns, links in documents, and form fields, for instance. So I'm hopeful that more files will be effectively accessible, even if they aren't completely accessible.

        Loretta