PDF Accessibility with Python

The talk will be focused on a project that Anand developed along with the "Egovmon" (E-government monitoring, http://www.egovmon.no) project based in Norway for measuring the accessibility of PDF documents used by municipalities across Norway. The project is sponsored by a set of 20 municipalities in Norway and Difi, (The Agency for Public Management and eGovernment) Norway and consists of an online interactive PDF checker which allows the user to submit a PDF URL and obtain accessibility metrics immediately.

The talk will start off with PDF document format and a brief on why it is not very amenable to accessibility. Then we will go on to discussing the open source tools in Python on PDF processing, specifically about pyPdf, the library behind this project. Finally we will look at the back-end library itself and see a few demoes of the online checker in action.

• The PDF document format
• Making PDF accessible - tags, reading order and other
• Dos and donts with PDF accessibility
• Why scanned PDF is Evil!
• Python and PDF
• The pyPdf library
• The Egovmon project - Background
• PDF-WAM (Web accessibility Module)
• Design of PDF-WAM
  • SOAP interface
  • Python dictionary format for results
• PDF checker demonstration
• Q & A

Nothing specific.

Anand is a software professional based in Bangalore, India. Anand has been in the IT field for the past 12 years working as a developer and architect. He is currently with McAfee, Bangalore as Principal Engineer.

Anand has had a lot of experience with Python as a developer, consultant and community organizer. He has worked with leading research groups in Europe on web accessibility projects such as EIAO (http://www.eiao.net) and Egovmon (http://www.egovmon.no) as consultant. He (used to) blog on http://randombytes.blogspot.com.