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Re: PDF accessibility repair question

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Jun 29, 2011 8:00AM

Sean,
I took a look at the sample file that you sent separately and if you run "save as optimized PDF", including all of the clean up setting options, the selection issues go away. The issue seems to be that the PDF document originally created from Powerpoint (using Mac OSX Quartz PDFContext as the producer) was malformed.

The PDF optimizer is pretty good at correcting these issues, and I'd encourage you to try it if you haven't...

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick
Group Product Manager, Accessibility
Adobe Systems

<EMAIL REMOVED>
http://twitter.com/awkawk
http://blogs.adobe.com/accessibility


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Sean Keegan
Sent: Thursday, June 23, 2011 1:22 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] PDF accessibility repair question

I generally think I know what I am doing with PDF documents and accessibility, but I am bit stumped on this one and would appreciate a kick to the head (or other anatomical region):

I am working to tag PDF documents that were originally authored as MS PowerPoint files for a poster display presentations (with no consideration for accessibility) and converted to PDF using a Mac. I do not have access to the original MS PowerPoint files. Aside from the annoying "z-index-type"
issues that have occurred when using the TouchUp Reading Order (TURO) Tool to zone/mark the PDF documents, most of the files have been relatively easily to repair for accessibility issues.

Unfortunately, I am encountering several PDF documents in which the TURO Tool will not zone any of the text on the screen. It is text as I can copy/paste the text from the document into a text application, but I cannot actually zone a text block and get the blue highlight showing what text content has been selected. Adding tags automatically as well as manually has also failed. I have looked in the Content panel and there is no information displayed in that panel view. Attempting to run Adobe Acrobat's OCR process fails. I have also tried exporting the document as an Image file (to then run through OmniPage), but I cannot export any derivative of the PDF. There is no security on the document.

So, at this point, I have a PDF document with text on the screen, but cannot use any of the accessibility tools (or any tool actually) to fix the document for accessibility purposes. Has anyone else run into this sort of document situation and found a solution for adding tags?

Take care,
Sean