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Correct PDF/UA tagging structure for Indexes ?

for

From: Rick Davies
Date: Jan 2, 2024 10:05AM

Hello all,

The estimable PDF Association has explanatory technical notes about how to conform to the
PDF/UA standard. But those documents don't contain many illustrative examples and *no*
illustrative examples about index markup--I guess they are not intended as cookbooks. The
PDF Association also has several helpful example PDF/UA documents contributed by third
parties--none of them contain indexes. After weeks of searching, I have not been able to
find much or anything about PDF/UA index markup: no credibly tagged PDF/UA documents with
indexes. The old Adobe PDF 1.6 document has a magnificent index, but no Index tagging.
All the successor ISO PDF standard documents don't have any indexes 🙁.

So I'm wondering a) if anyone knows where such examples may be found and b) how should a
developer of a PDF output generator produce PDF/UA tagging for the following index structure?
(The objective is that the PDF output-generator should create 'born accessible' PDFs,
without the need for any remediation.)

Rough and ready index example:
Index
___
A
___

Artichokes                  3, 15-38, 133
    cooking                16, 31, 32, 33
    in oil                         31, 32
    in butter                      31, 33
    growing
    hyponetically                   24-27
    au naturelle                    20-21

Artischocken                   66, 70, 90
    Kochen                     80, 81, 92

Avocados                       55-58, 133

...
___
B
___

Bananas 65, 65

In the above 'A' and 'B' are index sub-headings, aka group titles. And the 'au naturelle',
'Artischocken' and 'Kochen' represent index entries in different languages.

What would be the complete PDF/UA tagging required to express the above index structure,
including page links? Is there a tagging structure for the above that would be compatible
with all of UA-1, UA-2, PDF 1.7 and PDF 2 ?

OTOH this mailing list "is for anyone interested in discussing *web* accessibility issues" so
perhaps the above question would be better asked somewhere else? The PDF Association does
not seem to have a forum ...

All suggestions and comments very gratefully received 🙂.

Many thanks,

Rick

--
Rick Davies, Technical Sales Manager
Palm Gate, Kenmare,
Co. Kerry, Irelandwww.miramo.com