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Using PDFs

Many documents available on the Commonwealth website are in PDF format. Users will require Adobe Acrobat Viewer in order to view and print such documents. Adobe Acrobat Reader is free and can be downloaded from: http://www.adobe.co.uk/products/acrobat/readstep2.html 

All new PDF documents are created with Version 6.0 and should be accessible to new screen readers, we are striving towards making all web documents accessible including attached documents.

Older versions of Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) are not compatible with most screen-reading software. Visitors 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

For systems that are not connected to the Internet, 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 helps to overcome some of the problems of reading PDF documents with screen readers, but for systems with Internet access, Adobe recommends using the forms-based Access translation serviceinstead.

To report accessibility problems about a particular page or comment on our accessibility policies, please send an e-mail to: webteam@commonwealth.int.  

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