Are PDF files usable?

[John Colby]

Just as an aside, there's a product called PDFaloud from http://www.pdfaloud.com/ that my faculty in the university uses that speech enables any PDF file - and IMHO better than the facilities in Acrobat Reader 6 as you can select portions of the text to be read.

[revsorg]

We recently did some user testing of one of our websites and found that when we posed questions that asked the users to find information that happened to be contained in PDF files they universally failed to look in the PDFs to find it.

We concluded that putting crucial information in PDFs is effectively hiding it.

[redux]

We concluded that putting crucial information in PDFs is effectively hiding it.

on a related note: if your site provides a search function, and your search engine does not spider PDFs etc, this problem is compounded even further (speaking as someone working at a place that still uses the otherwise excellent http://www.htdig.org/ )