dive into mark

Washington Post: Talking Tax Forms For Blind Developed. The article confuses the issue somwhat, but as far as I can tell, the IRS just ran their PDFs through Adobe’s Make Accessible Plug-In, cleaned them up, and republished them. (I say just, but this process is non-trivial, not completely automated or automateable, and quite commendable.) The actual talking is not done by the forms themselves, but by screen reader software which has been updated to read the tags inserted into the enhanced PDF documents.

The W3C is working on guidelines for authoring accessible PDF documents, though the recommendations may be a bit too low-level for most. I believe the Make Accessible Plug-in is based on these recommendations.

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