WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Acrobat X Form Fields not in the tag tree

for

From: Karlen Communications
Date: Mar 5, 2012 8:48AM

There is a documented hierarchy of tasks for working with PDF documents.

1. Is the document a scanned image? If yes, perform OCR.
2. Does the document have form controls? If yes, add them.
3. Does the document have links? If yes add them (use the Content, create
links from URL's and then manually add any that were not identified. You get
a total number once the automated tool completes. The tool looks for full
web addresses rather than those that start with www.) I think it is in
Content Tools to the right of the document.
4. If you have multimedia in the PDF, add it. It will be an <<Annotation>
Tag and is not accessible but this is the process. If is not accessible even
if you add it later so I made an author's decision to go for the optimized
accessibility in my last book.

Once all of that is done, THEN you Tag the document and make repairs.

Adobe has this in most of their documents without my commentaries on links
and multimedia. :-)

Cheers, Karen


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Carr, Robert G.
Sent: March-05-12 10:10 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Acrobat X Form Fields not in the tag tree

Hi Karen-

We were starting from tagged PDF files. It seems counterintuitive to start
with untagged PDFs, but our intuition has failed us to this point anyway.

Thanks very much for your guidance, we'll give this a shot.

Warm regards,
Rob

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Karlen
Communications
Sent: Monday, March 05, 2012 8:53 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List'
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Acrobat X Form Fields not in the tag tree

Did you start with an untagged PDF? When creating forms, you have to start
with an untagged PDF. Use Print, Adobe PDF as your printer. Work on the form
controls in Acrobat and THEN add Tags.

Cheers, Karen

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Carr, Robert G.
Sent: March-05-12 9:37 AM
To: ' <EMAIL REMOVED> '
Subject: [WebAIM] Acrobat X Form Fields not in the tag tree

We are working to add form fields to some forms that were originally created
in MS Word 2010. We used Word to lay the form fields and other text out and
removed the form field placeholders for radio buttons and text boxes before
converting them to PDF. We have had Acrobat identify text entry fields and
we have manually added radio buttons. In either case, the form fields do
not appear in the tag tree.

Though not in the tag tree, NVDA read the form fields that we have added.

We manually tagged the radio buttons and found that, while in the tag tree,
they were then not read by NVDA.

I have found some posts online about this happening in Acrobat X, but no
solutions yet. I would appreciate it if the resident WebAIM list PDF gurus
chimed in to point us in the right direction.

Thanks much,

Rob Carr
Coordinator
CCE-IT Digital Accessibility Center
College of Continuing Education Information Technology University of
Oklahoma Outreach
405.325.3303 (Desk)
405.664.2772 (Cell)
<EMAIL REMOVED> <mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> >