If the Trump administration doesn’t kill the ADA law changes regarding digital accessibility set to go into effect soon, Adobe is going to leverage the law to unseat the PDF format on the web in an effort to get people to pay for a subscription-based content management system.
Adobe doesn’t own the PDF standard. They gave it to the International Standards Organization in 2008. Acrobat’s accessibility checker has never been updated to newer standards, even as the federal government has moved to require compliance with WCAG 2.1 (a web standard). Their checker does partial WCAG 2.0 and PDF/UA, which was released in 2008. The ISO is working on PDF 2.0, which is not backwards compatible with PDF/UA, nor will files compliant with WCAG be able to meet the PDF 2.0 spec.
Which means that Acrobat (or InDesign) won’t be able to make files that can be legally shared online by many organizations. Adobe will leverage their near monopoly to steer designers into cloud products integrated into their publishing software as a means up fill the niche vacated by PDFs.
If the Trump administration doesn’t kill the ADA law changes regarding digital accessibility set to go into effect soon, Adobe is going to leverage the law to unseat the PDF format on the web in an effort to get people to pay for a subscription-based content management system.
Adobe doesn’t own the PDF standard. They gave it to the International Standards Organization in 2008. Acrobat’s accessibility checker has never been updated to newer standards, even as the federal government has moved to require compliance with WCAG 2.1 (a web standard). Their checker does partial WCAG 2.0 and PDF/UA, which was released in 2008. The ISO is working on PDF 2.0, which is not backwards compatible with PDF/UA, nor will files compliant with WCAG be able to meet the PDF 2.0 spec.
Which means that Acrobat (or InDesign) won’t be able to make files that can be legally shared online by many organizations. Adobe will leverage their near monopoly to steer designers into cloud products integrated into their publishing software as a means up fill the niche vacated by PDFs.