[potentially OT] UN resolutions in opaque PDF format

[simo]

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 11:06 +0100, Andreas K. Foerster wrote:
> Am Dienstag, dem 31. Okt 2006 schrieb Alessandro Rubini:
> 
> > > I am not sure, whether I really understand, what your problem is.
> > 
> > He said it's a problem of accessibility. Some people out here have
> > special media to access information: while ascii is managed by all of
> > them, images are sometimes offlimits.  Good pdf documents can be
> > converted to text, but he's reporting that UN directives are images.
> > 
> > While not a free-software problem, I agree we have a problem here.
> > And I appreciate the politeness of mr. Alvarez in his choice of the
> > email subject.
> 
> I could imagine, that they do it deliberately, to make it harder to
> manipulate that documents. Maybe there are even invisible watermarks, 
> or things like that.
> 
> Remember, that are not just informational texts, but important
> documents!

If they are published it is because they want to let people access them.
The more they are important, the more it is important they are truly
accessible.
I think they just didn't think what problem it is to read such documents
by visually impaired people.
I am sure that if you dig deep enough you will find some accessibility
directive that the UN should follow and doesn't right now.

So I'd say that at least politely asking for such a version explaining
in full detail what is the problem, making it clear that blind people
have problems reading them in current form, will make a difference.

And unless you find a very insensitive person on the other side it will
rise the right questions inside the organization that publish these
documents.

Simo.