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The Graduate School, University Libraries, along with the Web Accessibility Center and the ADA Coordinator's Office, are sponsoring a live, interactive, online web workshop on creating accessible PDF files on Dec. 11 at various locations around campus. The presenter will be Sean Keegan from the High Tech Center Training Unit of the California Community Colleges from 1-2 p.m. in 090 Engineering Library, 226 University Hall, and 009 Ramseyer Hall. To RSVP at the Engineering Library, contact Patricia McCandless at 292-7089 or mccandless.1@osu.edu; for University Hall, contact Dena Myers at 292-9490 or myers.663@osu.edu; or Joe Wheaton at 009 Ramseyer Hall, 292-8313, or wheaton.3@osu.edu.

When you create PDF documents, do you know whether they are unstructured documents, structured or tagged documents? Did you know that in Australia the human rights legislation flatly states that PDF does not meet its accessibility requirements and that HTML versions must always be provided to guarantee accessibility? What are the accessibility problems of PDF documents? What has Adobe done to try to solve those problems? What can you do yourself to create PDF documents that can best approach accessibility?

This 60-minute voice-based Web conference can only scratch the top of the topic. Our target audiences are faculty, course designers, librarians and others using PDF as a simple and fast way to take course content and prepare it for the Web. PDF does also provide the possibility of creating highly complex documents with many interactive Web features. This introduction will not probe deeply into those more highly technical, advanced features. But, if you are creating relatively simple PDF and want to make those documents reasonably accessible for students with disabilities, this hour-long introduction will get you started.