Improvements with Acrobat 9
2. November 2008 von helmut
With the release of Acrobat 9 Adobe in general introduces a interesting new version of Acrobat called Acrobat Pro Extended. As the set of features stays the same in all other versions (Reader, Standard and Pro) the version Pro Extended delivers two basic improvements from my point of view
- the possibility to integrate video and audio material
- the new feature PDF-Maps
What does this mean from the view of accessibility?
(1) Integration of video- and audio-information –> of course it is necessary to add alternative texts to this elements. A hearing-impaired consumer needs this additional information to get access to the content of the video. A visually impaired consumer also needs alternative information for the playback by a screen reader.
But Adobe offers no additional opportunity for the creation of alternative texts for audios or videos. But Adobe delivers an interesting solution: A producer could add subtitles or alternative audio information during the creation in the editing software. What a bad solution! I think it is not wrong when I say, that Adobe totally neglected the accessibility since the release of version 7.
(2) PDF-Maps: with this new feature it is possible to create maps including meta information and coordinates by the import of geo data. This maps could be tagged and so alternative texts could be added, so Adobe. Also PDF-Maps are scalable in their displayed size. At least this is possible.
Up to now I had found no time to test these function complexes. I hope to catch up on this soon.
