Adobe Announces Acrobat Access for Windows

PDF files now compatible with screen-readers used by the visually impaired

Mountain View, Calif., (April 30, 1996) (Nasdaq: ADBE) -- Adobe Systems,
Incorporated announced today the availability of the beta version of Adobe
Acrobat Access for Windows, a plug-in application that will enable
documents in the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) to be accessible by
the blind and vision impaired. Acrobat Access for Microsoft Windows is
available at no charge from Adobe's Web site.

"Because Acrobat provides an easy and powerful way to get information
on-line, many businesses and organizations have standardized on Acrobat
for distributing large amounts of critical information on the Web, CD-ROM
and corporate networks," said Judy Kirkpatrick, Acrobat market development
manager, Adobe Systems Incorporated. "Adobe is very pleased to enable the
wide variety of information available in PDF to be more accesible to the
visually disabled."

The Acrobat Access plug-in allows customers to access PDF files through
Windows screen-reading programs. Screen readers work well today with
one-column text that is oriented horizontally left to right and top to
bottom but do not work well with documents that may include multiple
columns of text, text on a curve, or vertical text. Because PDF can be
used to represent highly-formatted documents, the Access plug-in infers
the reading order of text in a PDF file and provides an alternate view
that can be used by screen reading programs. Multi-column documents, for
example, are "straightened" to become horizontal text that is more easily
interpreted by the screen reader.

Availability

The Acrobat Access plug-in is available free in pre-release version today
from Adobe's Web site at http://www.adobe.com/Acrobat/Access.html and is
designed to work with the latest version of Acrobat Reader software,
codenamed "Amber". Versions of Acrobat Access for Windows are available
for Microsoft Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, Windows 95 and Windows
NT 3.51.

Based in Mountain View, California, Adobe Systems Incorporated develops and
supports products to help people express and use information in more
imaginative and meaningful ways, across all print and electronic media.
Founded in 1982, Adobe helped launch the desktop publishing revolution.
Today, the company offers a market-leading line of application software
and type products for creating and distributing visually rich
communication materials; licenses its industry-standard technologies to
major hardware manufacturers, software developers and service providers;
and offers integrated software solutions to businesses of all sizes. For
more information, see Adobe's home page at http://www.adobe.com on the
World Wide Web.
 
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