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Re: PDF accessibility

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From: Jonathan Avila
Date: Oct 31, 2015 3:33PM

> Be aware that in order for the form controls to be accessible, once you've built the accessibility into the form controls/fields themselves, you THEN Tag the document. You don't add form controls/fields to an already tagged PDF.

I've added accessible form fields to many already tagged documents. Admittedly it's more work because you have to had the Form OBJR for each field manually via (tags > find > unmarked annotations) but IMO it can be done. In fact, if you check the "tag annotations" item on the tags options menu the form OBJ will be added to the currently selected tag in the tree automatically when you insert the form field. So you would then need to create the form tags and then select them before creating each form field and then you would have tagged accessible form fields after you supply tooltips.

Jonathan

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Jonathan Avila
Chief Accessibility Officer
SSB BART Group
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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Karlen Communications
Sent: Saturday, October 31, 2015 1:20 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PDF accessibility

My list would be the same but I would add that the form controls must be accessible.

Be aware that in order for the form controls to be accessible, once you've built the accessibility into the form controls/fields themselves, you THEN Tag the document. You don't add form controls/fields to an already tagged PDF. If you are using a Word document as a template, this is the ONLY time you use Print to PDF to create an untagged PDF. You open the untagged PDF in acrobat Pro and begin adding the form controls. (Unless the document is a scanned document, in which case you perform the text recognition first.)

Here is the hierarchy of tasks that Adobe established years ago and I advocate that clients use:

1. Is the PDF a scanned document? If yes, perform Text Recognition.

2. Is the PDF document a fillable form? If yes, then add the "accessible" form controls/fields.

3. Does the PDF document have links? If yes, then use the Create Links from URL's tools and the Links tool to add them.

4. Does the PDF document have multimedia? If yes, then add the multimedia. I would add that the multimedia itself must be accessible and.

Only THEN do you add Tags to the document and then go through the remediation and/or Quality Assurance process. So the list of basics for the document are the same, but since you are adding another element, the form controls/fields also have to be accessible .

Cheers, Karen



-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of lcmcevoy
Sent: October 31, 2015 11:05 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PDF accessibility


What would your list be if it was PDF forms?






On Oct 30, 2015, at 10:54 AM, Duff Johnson < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

>> I am working on making PDFs from my organisation more accessible. As we have a very large amount of documents, I would like to make sure of what is really mandatory to help visually impared, and what isn't. So far, I think that the 5 elements listed below are the most important. Does anyone thinks we are missing something really important?
>>
>> - Define title of document and show it
>> - Define heading titles
>> - Mark background images as background
>> - Links from real words, and not "click here"
>> - Image alt text
>>
>> Thank you very much for your opinion.
>
> Off-the-cuff, if I was to make a list of the 5 "most important" things, and assuming these are documents and not forms, the list might look more like:
>
> 1 Ensure PDF documents are tagged
> 2 Ensure all semantically significant content is tagged
> 3 Ensure the tags are in the correct logical reading order
> 4 Ensure the tags are semantically correct
> 5 Ensure content tagged as <Figure> includes alternative text, or
> ActualText, as appropriate
>
> Duff.
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
>