Q:
What are PDFtron’s plans in regards to the Android / Windows 8 / iOS SDK for supporting Accessibility for the visually impaired, especially regarding compliance to Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973?
http://www.access-board.gov/sec508/standards.htm
A:
You can use the current version of PDFNet (on all platforms) to implement the required accessibility feaures. Basically you would use ‘pdftron.PDF.TextExtractor’ (see http://www.pdftron.com/pdfnet/samplecode.html#TextExtract) to extract Unicode text in the reading order. This text can be used for ‘text to speech’ and other accessibility applications. Text can also be loaded in HTML view (e.g. UIWebView or equivalant) and font can be adjusted to match viewers preferences (i.e. with automatic reflow). All of this is available today with minimal programming to make it happen.
Having said this, we are also working on a more advanced reflow engine that will also preserve fonts, images, tables, and other content and will be better integrated with the base control. This functionality will be available latter this year.