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Re: Reading upper-level Unicode glyphs in PDF

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Sep 7, 2009 9:10PM

Bev,
The characters you mention are almost certainly not supported by screen readers, no matter the format. Have you tried putting the characters into an HTML or Word document and hearing how they are spoken there? I'm betting you get similar results.

For character-level tags for emphasis and strong, I'm not sure why the tags are not coming through, but usually this information is carried in the accessibility data for text in a PDF outside of the tags. The question really should be "is the emphasis or bold treatment of my text exposed to assistive technologies in the PDF file". I'd need to see it to tell you...

Thanks,
AWK

Andrew Kirkpatrick

Senior Product Manager, Accessibility

Adobe Systems

<EMAIL REMOVED>


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Bevi Chagnon | PubCom
Sent: Monday, September 07, 2009 11:38 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: [WebAIM] Reading upper-level Unicode glyphs in PDF

I'm trying to find what the best solution is for inserting upper-level
glyphs into InDesign documents which are later exported as 508-accessible
PDFs. These glyphs are often symbols, such as bullets or scientific
characters, but can also include foreign language characters.

If I insert upper-level glyphs (higher than 255 from an OpenType or Unicode
font's extended character set) into an InDesign layout, the PDF doesn't pass
Acrobat's accessibility checker. Plus, when the glyphs are read by Acrobat's
Read Aloud utility, they're read as "blank" or "dot dot dot" or absolutely
nothing thereby ignoring the glyph.

My client's JAWs reader also isn't reading them correctly (I don't know
which version of JAWS my client is using).

Glyph examples:

From Myriad Pro, the Ohm sign (towards the end of the list) CID 390,
Unicode 2126

Or MS Arial Unicode, the Black Knight chess character, Unicode 265E

From Wingdings, the "checkmark in box" character, 0xFE (this is not a check
box field in a form: instead it's a symbol of a checked box you'd use in a
to-do list).

What's the best way to handle these symbol glyphs?

FYI, I can create character-level tags in InDesign (such as <emphasis> and
<strong>) but they are not retained when a PDF is exported from InDesign.

TIA,
--Bevi Chagnon

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Bevi Chagnon | <EMAIL REMOVED> | www.PubCom.com
Government and non-profit publishing specialists for print, web, marketing,
Acrobat, & 508
PublishingDC Group Co-Moderator |
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/PublishingDC
Bevi blogs on Facebook |
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And she tweets on Twitter | www.twitter.com/pubcom
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