[free-sklyarov] PDF cracking and accessibility

[Pablos Kadrevis]

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Date: Friday, July 20, 2001 10:32 AM +0200
From: Marcus Groeber <mgroeber at compuserve.com>
To: "nicehair at boycottadobe.com" <nicehair at boycottadobe.com>
Subject: PDF cracking and accessibility

Hi "boycottadobe.com",

one very interesting aspect that I came across with regards to PDF
cracking:

There is a rather legitimate use of such tools that seems to be often
overlooked: accessibility by the disabled, especially blind people. I
just recently witnessed a situation where machine-readable manuals in
PDF format were inaccessible to screen reading programs for the blind
because of the "no export" flag being set. Only the use of a PDF cracker
(by Elcomsoft :-)) made it possible for blind users to get to the
information - all this despite Adobe's ostentative commitment to
accessibility.

In other words, not allowing the cracking of PDF files may be a
violation of the "Section 508" accessibility rules that many companies
have recently scrambled to comply with...

Maybe this helps. ;-)

ciao marcus

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