Dis/ability, of course it's a PDF, and no one asks us
Dis/ability, of course it's a PDF, and no one asks us
Posted Dec 24, 2021 17:35 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)In reply to: Dis/ability, of course it's a PDF, and no one asks us by Devinprater
Parent article: The Linux Foundation's report on diversity, equity, and inclusion in open source
PDF and EPUB address very different use cases. And HTML is god-frickin' awful as a replacement for EPUB.
PDF is a fix-once layout tool. EPUB is a display-anywhere no-fix tool. And HTML, well! It's absolutely useless for its intended purpose - the number of times I print a document only for the print version to bear no resemblance whatsoever to the on-screen version!
Still. I guess you're a perfect example of people who think that there's no place for specialist languages until they've been bastardised by corner case after corner case into a Turing-complete mess completely unsuitable for their original purpose...
Sorry, but PDF has its uses and EPUB/HTML is a totally unfit replacement. Although I feel your pain - PDF is unfit for many of the purposes for which it is abused ...
Cheers,
Wol
Posted Dec 24, 2021 18:22 UTC (Fri)
by amacater (subscriber, #790)
[Link]
Similarly, if you need to change foreground/background colours, font sizes, highlighting - you can do that from CSS or similar directives
PDF is a free format but use of it disenfranchises a small but significant minority. Text to speech, screen readers and other assistive technologies are behind on Linux - they pose hard problems and any informed programming effort would be more than welcome. The drift to handing everything "in the cloud" may also not help Linux users as it continues.
Dis/ability, of course it's a PDF, and no one asks us
See also https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/
[And yes, there are a bunch of us living with other conditions / identifying as neurodivergent or whatever]