[Pkg-gmagick-im-team] Bug#1017624: imagemagick: Unblocking PDF Ghostscript functionality as an A11y issue

[Shannon Brady]

Package: imagemagick
X-Debbugs-Cc: shannonbrady at google.com
Version: 8:6.9.11.60+dfsg-1.3+gu0

Dear Maintainer,
The imagemagick policy.xml file included in the imagemagick-6-common binary
 (
https://sources.debian.org/src/imagemagick/8%3A6.9.11.60%2Bdfsg-1.3/config/policy.xml/)
 has been blocking Ghostscript format types due to past vulnerabilities in
Ghostscript (https://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/332928/). However, even after
the patch to Ghostscript, the blocking policy was still set as the default
due to the possibility of further issues with Ghostscript.

However, the PDF functionality being blocked here is a critical function of
pdfsandwich (https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/pdfsandwich), which is commonly
used as an accessibility tool for visually impared users. This tool allows
them to capture the text from image only PDFs, and sandwiches an invisible
pdf with that text behind the original, making otherwise inaccessible PDFs
readable by screen readers.

Although users can choose to manually go in and change this themselves, I
believe that this is a barrier to use for Debian users that require
screen-reader functionality. Would the maintainers consider defaulting the
PDF pattern to "read|write"rather than "none"?
Cheers,
Shannon
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