ERS aims to make documents on its World Wide Web server accessible to the widest possible audience, including persons with visual disabilities.
ERS web pages are generally accessible for persons using screen-reading
devices. A description of the elements of accessible web pages is
found in The National Federation of the Blind's
Guidelines
for Web Page Accessibility and the Trace Research Center of
the University of Wisconsin's Unified
Web Site Accessibility Guidelines. Yahoo has a listing of companies
that provide
adaptive
computer technology, including screen-reading software.
Many of the documents on the ERS website are in HTML or ASCII (plain
text) formats. These formats are generally accessible to persons
using screen-reading software. We also have a large number of documents
in Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) format and this
format is not compatible with most screen-reading software.
adobe acrobat portable document format (PDF)
files Persons using screen-reading devices generally cannot
directly read documents in PDF format. Adobe Systems, Inc., provides
a free translation service through their
Access web pages, which will translate PDF files to web pages (HTML
documents). This can be used in one of three ways:
- The user's browser can be configured to use this service as
a helper application, so that every time they click on a link
to a PDF document, this document is automatically sent to the
Access server and returned as a web page.
- The user can go to the Access.adobe.com
server and fill out a form. When this form is submitted, the server
will retrieve the PDF document, translate it, and return it to
the user.
- The user can send an e-mail message to the Access server, giving
the address of the document to be translated. The server will
then get this document and translate it to either a web page or
a text (ASCII) document. Note that this is the only one of the
three options that also gives the ability to produce a text document
from the PDF file.
If PDF files are not on the Internet and the user doesn't want to submit the files as an e-mail attachment for translation, Adobe
Access is a free downloadable accessibility plug-in for use
with the latest versions of the Adobe Acrobat Reader for Microsoft
Windows 3.1, Windows 95, or Windows NT. This plug-in converts PDF files on a user's local system into plain text, which can be read by screen reading programs. For systems with Internet access, Adobe recommends using the
forms-based Access
translation service instead.
For other PDF tools, see the PDFzone
web site.
web browser support
The ERS web site is designed for use with web browsers which support
HTML 4, which includes Netscape Navigator/Communicator 4.x and above and
Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.x and above. Many pages function best with
Javascript enabled, and some pages will only work with Javascript enabled.
|