Investigating accessibility problems of Arabic PDF documents

Abstract

Portable Document Format (PDF) documents are increasingly being used to disseminate files over the web. PDF is a file format that is independent of the application used to create it. In order to make such file format universally accessible, it needs to follow certain standards defined by W3C. Yet, not all PDF files are equally accessible, especially for blind people. Blind people confront many difficulties with this type of document, in particular Arabic PDF. They are moving away from this type of documents while most of the documents on the web are of this kind. In this paper, we investigate the problems encountered by Arab blind people while accessing Arabic PDF files, and suggest solutions to overcome such problems.