Some of you might be interested in this Mastodon thread. It’s a bit of bashing PDFs for having poor accessibility, and some guidance on improving PDFs for accessibility.
Some people are saying they prefer MS Word over PDF for accessibility reasons. Of course the elephant in the room is that “accessibility” is an over-loaded word. It usually refers to usability by impaired people, but in the case of being generally usable to all people on a broad range of platforms, MS Word is obviously inaccessible due to being encumbered by proprietary tech by a protectionist corporation.
Thanks for your response and perspective. Yes, it could’ve been ridiculous to gatekeep what software people should use if some may provide a better experience out of the box. Worst case scenario it could’ve been seen like using people with disabilities as a vehicle for own principles like FOSS, anticapitalism etc. No need to limit their options. And it’s great that even greed, not pure altruism, can serve as a reason to make services more accesible.
One another question to you though, as it seems related: I’ve seen the Internet Archive and some other services provided an unique option to access even copyrighted materials one can’t just download there through some kind of a special program, registry, exclusively to visually impared folks. Have you ever used that? Are that and other such initiatives frequently used in blind community? What’s with the amounts of books they list, can they help with one’s interest in learning, reading?
A blog post about the Internet Archive’s collection, by their team: https://archive.org/post/305502/over-1-million-digital-books-now-available-free-to-the-print-disabled
I’m not familiar with that, but I’m aware of services for blind people to access books for free. It’s a good way to balance out the disproportionate lack of access to information.