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RE: Tagging PDF Files / Adobe Acrobat 5.0

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From: Zwack, Melanie
Date: Jul 10, 2002 8:09AM




Some of the documents have been developed in Word 97. (Apparently, Adobe
Acrobat is recommending that Microsoft Office 2000 products should be used
to ensure the best conversion to 508 ADA compliant--We are going to be
upgrading soon.) Like you are suggesting, it is best to develop the
documents using styles, etc.

Many others are developed in either Quark or PageMaker. We have a large
volume of PDF (already existing), and all the new PDFs coming in to be
converted as well.

We are being asked by clients to make the PDFs (large amounts of them), 508
compliant. We are using the Make Accessible Plug-In and it is actually
working very well, however some of the tagging doesn't appear to be exactly
correct, and we were wondering if it is necessary for the tagging to be
exactly correct, or is it just good enough that the document is successfully
read by Jaws.

Also for tables, the data is just read off from left to right, each data
cell is read. We were wondering if any one had come up with some standards
to include the statements such as:

column header: Alabama
row header: 1998
data cell: 48%

These are just some questions we've been having and we're wondering if
anyone else has been experiencing or made standards for these same issues.

Thank you for any input with this!



-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Abolins [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ]
Sent: Wednesday, July 10, 2002 10:37 AM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED> ; <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: Tagging PDF Files / Adobe Acrobat 5.0


I haven't used the plug-in myself but the description of the listed
items quirk reminds me of something I've encountered with Microsoft
Word's HTML conversions. Very often the documents I get for conversion
for Web formats yeild inaccurate renditions of ordered and unordered
lists.

I believe it is caused by something in how the author of hte original
documetn writes and edits the document. Then Word embeds codes that will
result in inaccurate HTML translation but appear fine in Word itself.

By any chance, mzwack, were the PDF documents created from a Word
document?

Thank you.

Jon Abolins

>>> <EMAIL REMOVED> 07/09/02 04:12PM >>>
[...]
For example, when we use the Make Accessible Plug-in -- It does a good
job
-- very little clean-up is required. However, we have noticed the
tagging is
not necessarily accurate. As in the case of listed items -- the tag may
be a
<P> tag rather than a <LI> tag. Some times, one paragraph is broken
apart as
seperate elements -- line by line -- rather than grouping the entire
paragraph element together. Despite all of this, the PDFs are working
great
in Jaws. But, should we try to get all the tags to be accurate even
though
it doesn't seem to affect the Jaws reader?
<snip>


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