[wilhelmtux-discussion] Re: PDF - Flanders - Law on equal opportunities

Claude Almansi claude.almansi at bluewin.ch
Fri Nov 21 13:23:30 CET 2003


Hi Theo and all!

Theo, you wrote:

"Es geht darum, dass offizielle Stellen öffentliche Informations-Sammlungen
bereitstellen, die von einer grossen Minderheit nicht benutzt werden können,
weil die Navigation nicht funktioniert. "

Maybe I'm hi-jacking what you mean - you seem to refer specifically to users
faced with Acrobat features that are not available with their non-Acrobat
PDF-readers - but I would say it is more than a "big minority" who is faced
with PDF-related navigation problems. Bakom and BBT are particularly prone
to making TOTALLY un-navigable PDFs (blank pages, too many columns, info
contained in gif or jpg pics etc).
Moreover, apart from the PDFs made by the Office for he Data Protection, I
have yet to see an admin.ch PDF  that uses bookmarks.

Until recently, when I met an unconvertible PDF, I used to refer authors to
Vincent Flanders' "Chairs are for sitting and PDF is for printing",
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/pdf.html . It's a clear and witty
explanation of the problems caused by PDF, and of how PDF should be
presented in a web page if they are absolutely necessary (letting users know
that it IS a PDF and how big it is). Unfortunately, some people apparently
took offense at the "webpagesthatsuck" part in the URL.

On Wednesday, however, the "ordonnance" regulating the application of the
equal opportunity law mentioned by Hans Raymondaz was officially published.
Press communique: http://www.ofj.admin.ch/themen/behinderte/vo-com-d.htm
Text of the ordonnance:
http://www.ofj.admin.ch/themen/behinderte/behiv-d.pdf
The part concerning Web accessibility is Section 5, article 10, which
mercifully specifies that the federal chancelry - and not Bakom - is in
charge of making directives towards the application of the law.

So now we can refer public admin people who make bad PDFs to these texts:
"ofj.admin.ch" should be more acceptable to them than "webpagesthatsuck".
And we can lobby the chancelry towards imposing an alternative, navigable
html version (which, to be fair, is already the case with most federal legal
texts produced by the chancelry).

Cheers

Claude



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