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increase the side to side scrolling. Reflow eliminates the horizontal scrolling so that documents can be easily read as a single column of text that fits the device or viewing area. The implications for this expand far beyond accessibility, because they can be used by all PDF users. It’s very helpful when viewing PDFs on devices such as PDAs, BlackBerry devices, or other web-enabled phones. There have been many times I have attempted to read PDFs on a Palm device, only to get frustrated by getting lost in all of the cross-scrolling. Access the reflow feature in Adobe Reader after you have increased the document View size by pressing Ctrl+4.

Text Zoom

The default zoom can be set anywhere between 8 percent and 6400 percent. This is done in the Edit ⇒ Preferences ⇒ Page Display menu in the Magnification settings. Again, this is a feature that is helpful to all Adobe Reader users.

Multimedia

Adobe Reader has made many strides in making accessibility options available, and the latest is through the multimedia options in Edit ⇒ Preferences ⇒ Multimedia. There are options to do the following:

Show subtitles

Play dubbed audio (when available)

Show supplemental text captions when available

Show audio description when available

Of course, these features are dependent upon creators to implement multimedia that includes these options. The main issue will be getting those who create these documents to make them easier for all users, but also they need to be aware of the features that are available. Sadly, I believe that most users are not aware of the simplest things they can do to make a PDF more accessibility-friendly, web-friendly, search-friendly, and user-friendly.

Friday: Accessibility Applied to Search

This week, while learning about accessibility, you should also see how much of the allowances and features presented can also provide better, more structured information that will help your website be more open to search engines, rank better, and meet the needs of users regardless of skill level or vision. The last area of consideration that bridges the needs of both assistive technology users and marketing is the use of link text.

Link text is important because it is used by sighted readers as a visual cue. It is also important to assistive technology users as a means of quickly scanning the content of the page through listening.

Scanning by Listening

Jakob Nielsen’s usability testing extends into the realm of testing accessibility and screen reader users. The study, “Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users with Disabilities” can be accessed at http://www.nngroup.com/reports/accessibility/ . One of the most interesting things that I found in the study was that screen reader users browse web pages similarly to sighted readers.

Sighted readers, as explored in Chapter 9, quickly scan through web pages in order to find the context of the content. This is done by scanning the page title, headings, images, and any bolded, highlighted, or linked text. A strikingly similar behavior is observed when screen reader users are listening to web pages. They listen to web pages according to the structure.

In accessibility testing of websites, screen reader users listen to the page information, typically the page title. Then, using a keystroke on JAWS, they would list the headings on the page and listen to the headings. The next step is listening to the links, and a keystroke brings up all the links on the page and reads them in order. By listening to the elements on the page, the screen reader user is able to determine whether the content they need is on the page before actually listening to every word on the page. Screen reader users scan by listening.

This is where developing a page structure defined by HTML attributes is critical in allowing accessibility for visitors because the assistive technology needs proper markup on the page to provide a significant content of information. Based on this, the user selects the link and repeats the process until getting to the page whose headings most closely matches