WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Pagemaker or QuarkXPress and Accessible PDF Document

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Sep 4, 2009 10:25AM

Hi Randy,

PDFs generated from Quark documents are always horrible with regard to
accessibility. I don't know about PageMaker but most programs of this nature
also produce horrible PDFs. Word and InDesign can produce relatively good
PDFs but only if the author knows what they are doing, which most don't.

There is currently no software that will automatically convert the documents
into accessible PDFs. It has to be done manually in Acrobat, and it can be
extremely difficult depending on the nature of the content and the program
it was authored with.

Acrobat has an autotagging feature but our experience is that it can only
cope with simple documents. On more complex documents it has been more
trouble than it is worth, and we actually never use it even on simple
documents.

We offer a service to create accessible PDFs or convert existing ones to be
accessible, and I suspect there are other people on the list who do so.

It is worth noting that there are dozens of factors that contribute to PDF
accessibility. The starting point is to correct the reading order and add
some semantic structure but there is much more you can do if you have the
time and budget. Our list of factors runs to a few A4 pages, and I can share
it if anyone wants to contact me off-list.

Regards,
Steve Green
Director
Test Partners Ltd