UK Association for Accessible formats

Making every document an accessible document

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Why a priority for 2022 must be moving UKAAF’s work more into the mainstream

black background wiht 2022 in gold

Our chair Roger Firman takes a look back over a busy year for the Association, while also putting some markers down for the next 12 months

Good morning, Roger, hope you are well, and thanks for taking the time to talk to us on the UKAAF blog. We had a conversation about two months after you’d …

Is there a future where there is no need for UKAAF to exist?

Blut Docto Who-like Tardis with Police wrritten on it
I recently sat down with UKAAF board member Jeff Mills, who has a particular focus for us on HTML, Office Documents and PDFs for us. With over 25 years’ experience in the document industry and amazing track record in making a difference in accessible documents, Jeff’s CV includes numerous landmarks like being involved in the first ever project to create accessible PDF statements for the Web.  Many UKAAF members will be familiar with the important commercial work he’s doing with his company Grackledocs, the only Google Add-Ons that check and remediate output from Google Workspace to make it more accessible.  All that means it’s always worth talking to him, but we had been intrigued by a comment in an email about what sort of a future he wants UKAAF to have.

Read more Is there a future where there is no need for UKAAF to exist?

Why is something as useful as Braille only put on medicine bottles and not everything we want to buy?

Child's hands reading braille

Did you know that

Braille’s roots lie in a Napoleonic Army system for communicating in battlefield conditions
That you can learn it at any age
That it draws inspiration from how dominoes are numbered
And that music notation has been a part of the system since its official debut in 1829?

These are just some of …

The story behind RNIB’s amazing new Alexa audiobook service

Amazon Alexa round speaker

Completely free and with over 34,000 titles, RNIB’s ‘Talking Books’ service offers audio fiction and non-fiction content for members to access, borrow and enjoy. And now, thanks to a new partnership between the charity and Amazon, the thousands of members with the Alexa home voice assistant find they have a great new ‘skill’: accessing great …

Kellogg’s, the PDF Association and Microsoft all promise “giant leaps towards accessibility”

Perso jumping into a lake, big stride

Sometimes, when it comes to the long fight to improve visual accessibility that UKAAF members and supporters are engaged in, a little bit of grass roots brilliance can go a long way to keep you optimistic. And the wonderful news I spotted on the BBC’s Newsround channel for younger viewers surely fits that description to …

UKAAF Celebrates 13 Years of Success

screen showing virtual meeting participants

Expertly and courteously chaired by our still relatively new UKAAF chair Roger Firman, the 13th annual UKAAF AGM has just successfully concluded.

In cyberspace again for the second time (thanks to a certain novel coronavirus), the event was ‘standing room only’ for board members and the many enthusiastic (and patient!) attendees via Zoom (32 all told) …

What will tomorrow’s tech look like? Ask someone who can’t see

Long brown haired girl by a bridge with her eyes closed

What links the 12-inch vinyl record, the computer keyboard, and even the text recognition software that laid the foundation for the modern database?

The answer: they were all initially brought to market for blind consumers. So it would seem everyone benefits if more people with disabilities are involved with making tools and systems—but it’s a message …