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Re: Use of Headings

for

From: Duff Johnson
Date: Jul 27, 2010 1:54PM

On Jul 27, 2010, at 3:11 PM, Karlen Communications wrote:

> It's not always that easy. If the client wants the document "not to change"
> one hair, there are structural elements that
> would best be implemented in the PDF Tags Tree.

Karen's absolutely right, and any structural error in PDF creation can be corrected in the tags tree. There's another consideration, however...

> -----Original Message-----
> From David Farough
> Sent: July-27-10 2:26 PM
> To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
> Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Use of Headings
>
> I think that the easiest way to deal with this would be to modify
> the physical structure of the source document and then convert to PDF
> afterwards.

One problem is that some source applications cannot presently create certain logical structures in PDF. For example, MS Word is (currently) incapable of correctly tagging row header cells with <TH>.

In the bigger picture, it's a reality that the source file (however capable) is frequently unavailable to those who have the responsibility of posting a given document for public view.

IMHO (and yes, duh, I'm an interested party), PDFs are interesting from an accessibility standpoint precisely because they provide a pretty keen model for making _any_ document accessible... including documents that started life in all kinds of systems, for all kinds of reasons.

Duff Johnson
Appligent Document Solutions
http://www.appligent.com