Rae Buerckner - Eccentric Geek » AIR

Adobe Co-founders to Receive the National Medal of Innovation and Technology at the Whitehouse in October

Rae Buerckner — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:02:56 +0000

Adobe’s co-founders to receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation at the White House in October: http://bit.ly/w6I3Y

ATO Major FAIL on Accessibility

Rae Buerckner — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 07:18:27 +0000

Yes it’s that time of year again, income tax return time and the ATO have once again provided an eTax application. Today on twitter I discovered that a glaring issue which has been a fault of eTax since it’s inception, and has not been addressed yet again, is that it only runs on the Windows platforms. What about the thousands of Australians who are running the MAC OS or the thousands who are running a Linux OS, they are being discriminated against based on their OS of choice.

Even in my house this isn’t good enough, I am using a Dell running Vista, yay! I can lodge my tax return using the very convenient eTax application, but my 16 year old daughter who has a part-time job at Boost Juice cannot because she is using a MacBook Pro.

Something needs to be done about this, and it needs to be done right now and made available to the public in the next couple of months. The lodgement date should be extended for people who are effected by this accessibility issue.

This really is something that should also be under HREOCs jurisdiction as it is a basic Human Right to run whatever operating system you choose to run.

Misconceptions Surrounding PDF Accessibility

Rae Buerckner — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 02:38:49 +0000

This is something which bothers me enormously. The following can be found on the AGIMO Web Content Accessibility Guidelines:

“Although there has been some progress in making it possible for people who are blind or vision-impaired to use online PDF forms, this option is considered inaccessible for most users. It is often possible to design online forms using non-PDF techniques. See, for example, http://www.mandoforms.com, which provides guides and tools for making online forms accessible.”

This information is incorrect, PDF documents and forms can be completely accessible and PDF is and has been for quite some time an ISO Standard.

Adobe are constantly actively participating with Standards groups to improve and enhance the platform and provide extensive up to date information regarding creating accessible PDFs.

The information contained in the Web Publishing Guidelines published by AGIMO are out of date and do not include accessibility information for Flex Applications or the Flash Platform. AGIMO are currently running a Focus Group discussing the rewriting of these Guidelines and need to pay particular attention to the Accessibility Guidelines, to allay any further misconceptions regarding accessibility and the PDF and Flash Platforms. Both Platforms are open source.

Disclaimer: I do not work for Adobe, I do run the ACT Adobe Products User Group for which I do not get paid, this is a Community group and not a Vendor group, many people other than myself donate their time to this group. I have worked with Adobe Partner companies in the past and did own my own Macromedia Premiere Partner company until 2002.

It should be noted that the above AGIMO links are to archived content and not the current Web Publishing Guidelines. The reason this post has been made is because Agencies are still using this outdated content which is quite often republished in their Corporate CMS and used by web content publishing teams as the most current information.

It should also be noted that the most current Web Publishing Guide does not address the above types of content, namely PDF and Flash Platform content. These types of content are addressed by HREOC and the information given by HREOC clearly states that ideally web content should be made available in at least three formats, being HTML, PDF and RTF.

***UPDATE*** Thursday 6 August, 2009
Adobe’s latest accessibility guidelines can be found here.