accessibility win for once

[jadelennox]

It turns out that my state's Department of Conservation and Recreation runs a Universal Access Program that matches people who have disabilities with outdoor activities that have been adapted. So far this year my sister has done adapted sailing and adapted ice-skating, and the program also seems to have all kinds of skiing, hiking, and boating activities.

Ironically, the UAP website is terrible. They never define what they mean by "or accessible" or "adapted" (though I extrapolate from what I've seen that means they have equipment adapted for people who use wheelchairs or people who have upper body strength and control but no lower body strength/control; along with some sign language interpretation, large print, and audio materials). The closest they come to defining what activities are actually available and how they have been adapted is in their brochure, which is a PDF that's designed so badly that I can't read it on the screen at all, and if somebody uses a screen reader wants a completely surreal and Dadaist experience, I recommend trying to use your screen reader to read the brochure. COMEDY.

Comments

[jld]

I tried running it through pdftotext, which actually does a pretty good job — the upside-down text is not reversed, nor are the columns interleaved. It looks like, by default, it just outputs the text in the order it appears in the PDF file, and ignores all the positioning information. The tables, however, wind up as strings of “NA NA NA NA NA” and just about when you're expecting a “Batman!” there's a “1 5 1 3” or something; the important information there is in graphical symbols, of course.

(And I would be entirely unsurprised to learn that there are PDFs out that that put the lines/words/letters up in some bizarre order and depend on their being read in the intended positions.)