A friend of mine and I helped to publish an online magazine called Interspecies some time ago, where he would do the editing and I would do the publishing. This friend worked with the owner to collect and produce readable copy, who would then turn all the articles over to me, in .txt format at my request, for publishing. I worked in Adobe Illustrator CS2 (I didn't own Adobe InDesign and didn't feel I had much control over Scribus), produced some graphics, integrated some photos, slapped in the text and published to PDF format.

Why did I publish in PDF format? Before PDF was an open standard (ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008) and thus allowed to be openly implemented, the PDF format allowed me, the publisher, to control the design, content, imagery and layout of my publication down to the pixel. The PDF format would encapsulate my images, my vector graphics and even my font-family so that when John The Reader read my publication, it would look exactly the same to him as it did to me.

But what about the seeing-impaired? As a web developer, I try and follow the W3C WAI (Web Accessibility Initiative) and other accessibility standards and initiatives so that I can help aide people who don't have the manual dexterity to use a mouse or people who need a screen reader to view a web page. I've never seen such a person use any of my websites, but I hope by this practice I am making the web just that much more accessible for everyone. But is the PDF format really accessible?

This friend who I did publishing with has finished his undergraduate degree and is on his way to becoming a lawyer. Along the way, he is helping to publish a couple of newsletters (wasn't Barack Obama the editor and then president of the Harvard Law Review? -- just saying) and asked me,

If I am publishing a newsletter online and want people to be able to change fonts (it will be read by the seeing impaired), in what format should I send the newsletter out?

So I responded that the only way I knew how, was to publish on the web and either use (a) JavaScript/HTML/CSS and create buttons for the user to increase or decrease font size or (b) simply publish on the web and let the user use their tools (screen readers, web browser) and let them adjust the font size themselves. For instance, Mozilla Firefox (and many other open source browsers) all the use of [Ctrl] + [+] to increase font size, [Ctrl] + [-] to decrease font size and [Ctrl] + [0] to reset the font size, all on the fly. PDFs do not allow font sizes to be changed, unless you open them in some sort of PDF editor (but who has the time or resources to do that?)

If PDFs are great for strict publishers and the web is better (but not perfect) for accessibility, which one do you choose? What other choices do publishers and editors have to make sure their content can be read by the most amount of people?

Although I published in PDF format in the past, if I were to publish a magazine nowadays, I would publish on the web and allow the user to use their tools to adjust to their viewing needs. That's the suggestion I concluded with for my friend.

What are your thoughts?