Study on the creation of accessible PDF documents
Tags
Case Study, Interview Study, Participatory Design, Accessibility, PDF/UA
Background
Accessible documents are important to ensure that assistive technologies (e.g. screen readers) can process the contents of such documents completely and correctly and that people who depend on such assistive technologies can consume these documents.
The PDF/UA (Matterhorn Protocol) standard exists for PDF documents. The creation of PDF documents is difficult in practice. Common office programs, for example, are not able to create fully PDF/UA-compliant PDF documents, even if the necessary settings and entries for an accessible document have been made in the source document.
Task
The aim of this task is to investigate to what extent common Office programs are able to create accessible PDF documents and which tools can be used to support this.
The prerequisites for the creation of accessible documents are to be presented (based on the standards as well as the prerequisites in the source documents), as well as the process of creating accessible PDF documents up to the evaluation of the documents against the standards and the practical use.
The possibilities of creating PDF documents directly from the common Office products as well as with the help of so-called PDF converters (e.g. CIB pdf brewer) are to be examined.
The following questions need to be addressed:
- What are the requirements for creating accessible PDF documents?
- To what extent do the variously created PDF documents comply with the PDF/UA standard?
- To what extent do the differently created PDF documents meet the requirements for use in practice?
In this work, different office products and PDF converters are to be considered as well as, depending on the agreed scope of the work, the usability in practice of people who need assistive technologies for the consumption of PDF documents.
Requirement
- Experience with Office programmes and PDF documents
- Interest in participatory approaches
- Good knowledge of German and English
- Independent and structured work, commitment and enjoyment of working in a team
- Previous experience in qualitative field research and empiricism desirable
Target group
Students of the HCI, business informatics or related courses.
Scope
The scope is based on the course and format (thematic project or final theses).
Beginning
According to the arrangement
Contact
Sven Bittenbinder (Dipl.-Wirt.Inform.)
Research assistant
Wirtschaftsinformatik/IT für die alternde Gesellschaft
Universität Siegen, Fakultät III
Kohlbettstraße 15
57072 Siegen
Room: US-E 117 (Campus Unteres Schloss)
Phone: 0271 740-4470
E-Mail: sven.bittenbinder@uni-siegen.de