PDF's and Accessibility: Can they really be made accessible?

With Gian Wild

PDFs have always been an issue when it comes to accessibility. With the advent of WCAG2, it becomes the decision of policy-makers such as AGIMO and the Australian Human Rights Commission (formerly HREOC) as to whether PDFs are deemed an 'accessible technology' and whether they can be on a site without an accessible alternative.

AGIMO has underaken a review of PDFs and their capacity to be made accessible, concluding that PDFs are not an accessible technology and therefore should always be included with an alternative format (HTML, Word, text or RTF).
This was followed by a talk by AGIMO and Adobe on educating people on using PDFs. The feedback from many attendees is that now PDF is accessible.