I may be missing something obvious, but why is pdf such a bad choice?
As long as it has actual text and is reasonably typeset (selecting text in this pdf seems to work properly), I don't see what's wrong. I'd take it any day over webpages with random floating content that you have to click through and use a modern browser with javascript without blockers/filters for the content to even render, in small text on 20% of the page, with low contrast and somehow broken zoom.
Where it breaks down is some badly designed OCR systems which place the letters independently rather than in lines/blocks. But that's starting from a document which was not accessible in the first place, so not a huge issue.
As PDF is essentially saying, “put this thing here”, you’d think it wouldn’t. But it does. You can embed the source text for screen readers. It’s also how copying text from PDFs works.
The whole topic of this thread is reading web pages on a PSP. There's a whole universe of devices that perfectly render good old server-side HTML with CSS styling, but can't display a PDF for reasons. Or if they can, it will be annoying because it won't fit on the screen and be readable at the same time. That's its unique selling point as well as its biggest drawback.
I have to admit that many modern SPAs also won't rendet on many devices, though.
As long as it has actual text and is reasonably typeset (selecting text in this pdf seems to work properly), I don't see what's wrong. I'd take it any day over webpages with random floating content that you have to click through and use a modern browser with javascript without blockers/filters for the content to even render, in small text on 20% of the page, with low contrast and somehow broken zoom.