Suggestions on Secretary's Notes June No 640

[James]

It would be great if these could be posted as actual content on the site rather than PDFs.

PDFs are really awful for accessibility - plus as content they can be searched and archived a lot better.

[Ben Hutchings]

@James we’ll have a chat and work out something, as this question/issue is still undecided for Club Torques too. Sec notes have a ton of repeated content month on month. If we need to discuss this more I’ll move discussion to the website help / suggestions section. 

[Howard]

4 hours ago, James said:

It would be great if these could be posted as actual content on the site rather than PDFs.

PDFs are really awful for accessibility - plus as content they can be searched and archived a lot better.

Not sure what Acrobat reader can do these days, but there are plenty of viewers that allow you to search the content of non-scanned PDF's. Furthermore unlike most other formats the PDF format is likely to remain accessible for the foreseeable future so that alone is a good reason to retain it for Club Torque

[Ben Hutchings]

(Moved this) do carry on… 

[James]

I mean accessibility — for example:

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/accessibility-requirements-for-public-sector-websites-and-apps

Obviously this is not a public sector website, but I think we should all try harder to cater for those with issues in accessing content.

 

[Howard]

Can you please explain why you find PDF's unsuitable? If they are created properly with links you can go direct from an index page to any article & if its a problem of impaired vision/motor difficulties there are plenty of PDF to speech converters available. The good thing is that anyone can download and save copies of PDF's for their use and reference which can continue to exist as historic documents long after the CT web site shuts up shop because petrol powered cars are forbidden.

For this reason alone I changed my Hornby magazine subscription from Pocketmags to the publisher since they supply their magazine as a PDF which I can save to my computer without any concerns for the future.

FYI I publish the redrawn wiring diagrams I have generated for TR7's as .DWG files under an open source licence, but have to distribute them as PDF's because most individuals do not have access or the skills to use AutoCad type programs.

H

[James]

Hi Howard,

 

Why are PDFs unsuitable? I'd hope the above link explained it.

Some more reasons are here; https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should-be-published-in-html-and-not-pdf/

Again, I caveat that not all of this applies, but gives some good reasons.

I didn't say they couldn't also be PDFs — but primarily they should really be in normal webpages for people to be able to access them how they want.

I would prioritise people being able to access them in the now over things being archived in the future. There are things like https://archive.org/web/ that do a great job of this automatically — and in truth if you really want to you can always "File > Save as PDF" if you want.

(Unsurprisingly I do this for my job, and I have to worry about it there — and have seen the issues it can cause directly, as well as the benefits of doing-things-right)

 

James