Supporting PDF Accessibility Evaluation:Early Results from the FixRep Project
In: Hewson , A & Tonkin , E L 2010 , Supporting PDF Accessibility Evaluation : Early Results from the FixRep Project . in New Trends in Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries : Selected Papers Presented at the 2nd Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries . World Scientific Publishing Co. https://doi.org/10.1142/8144
The aim of this paper is to present results from a pilot study exploring automated formal metadata extraction in accessibility evaluation. Information about some types of accessibility may make up part of the formal metadata for a document. As the importance of document accessibility has become more widely accepted and relevant legislation has been identified and characterised, the possibility of storing information about document accessibility as part of the formal metadata held by the system has become more attractive. This is useful in order to provide a starting-point for an accessibility assessment. This study reviews accessibility issues linked to the PDF format in use. We demonstrate a prototype created during the FixRep project, that aims to support capture, storage and reuse of accessibility information where available, and to approach the problem of reconstructing required data from available sources. Finally, we discuss practical use cases for a service based around this prototype.