The Obama administration has made transparency and public access to government information a high priority. Adobe is attempting to capitalize on initiatives to make government information more accessible while promoting its technologies, such as Flash and PDF, as cornerstones for implementing open access. However, these technologies are actually an impediment to making information truly accessible.

Adobe has set up its "Adobe Opens Up" website to promote the use of Adobe technologies to achieve the goal of "opening up Washington," as well as highlighting ways in which federal, state, and local governments have implemented these technologies. While we agree that making information available in common formats, like PDF, is one helpful piece of this puzzle, we can't help but notice how the entire site—designed in Flash—is practically inaccessible.

After just a cursory browsing, here are some of the usability and data accessibility issues we observed. You can't select, copy, or paste any text. Your browser's font override features won't work, so you can't adjust the font or its size to be more readable. Your browser's built-in in-page search won't work, and you can't use the keyboard to scroll through the text. You can't parse or scrape the data in any way; the design is fixed-width, so it's not going to work well on different screen sizes; and browser plugins, like Greasemonkey, can't adjust anything. Basically when it comes to text at all, if you don't like the style or are visually impaired, you're screwed.

All the content of Adobe's "open government" site is locked inside of Flash.

Sunlight Labs, a nonprofit, nonpartisan Washington, DC based organization focused on digitization of government data and making tools and websites to make it easily accessible, similarly feels that technologies like Flash and PDF—while ubiquitous and useful—do not intrinsically make government more open. In particular, the group is critical of the fact that data in PDF format is not easily parsable into other useful forms.

PDFs are great for presenting data and information in a particular format, and the format is a useful tool for getting that formatted version to the public. Anyone who has tried to copy and paste more than one line of text from a PDF, though, has likely experienced the issues that can happen—unrelated text from sidebars or the margins often ends up inline, requiring custom editing. As one example to illustrate the problem further, Sunlight Labs recently had to write custom software to parse a 1,018 page healthcare reform bill (H.R. 3200 "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009") that was provided to the public only in PDF format. Without this parsing, any analysis of the text would need to be done by hand.

Further, we note the irony of the fact that the bill Sunlight Labs was attempting to analyze is actually stored internally in XML format, but only offered to the public in PDF form. XML is easily converted to a formatted PDF, which is what the House did to generate the PDF that it made available. Going the other direction—from formatted PDF to structured, machine-readable data—is a much harder, and sometimes insurmountable, task. It's also worth noting that XML is also easily transformed to other structured formats, like HTML.

Wrapping all publicly accessible information in proprietary formats is neither a good nor complete solution. Providing documents in PDF form, or augmenting a website with additional Flash content is certainly useful. However, the goal of open government would be better served using open standards, like HTML, XML, JSON, ODF, and other formats that are both accessible and machine-readable. Doing so ensures that public information truly remains usable by the public.