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Re: making footnotes accessible in PDF documents

for

From: Jennifer Sutton
Date: May 26, 2012 3:45PM

Ryan et al:

Thanks for your time and thoughts, Ryan.

Writing "a good chunk of Javascript" is not a solution that's going
to work for my client.

I suppose the "reading order" could be set to assure that relevant
footnotes read after each paragraph to which they pertain, but I
don't believe that's the preferred convention. And I would not be
keen to somehow set the screen reader reading order to be different
from the visual reading order (if that's even possible).

Honestly, this kind of footnote navigation is common on the Web and
has been possible in ebooks for many years, now, so I'd think it'd be
common in Adobe, since it's more and more being used to create ebooks
which are likely to have footnotes at the bottom of each page.

It seems that I should clarify that the PDF in question already
exists, so it will not be a matter of converting from Word. This
document is large, so it would be a waste of time to convert back to
Word and recreate.

I doubt that my client is going to want to procure a separate
software package to assist with remediation (sorry, Duff).

What my client wants to do is to be able to generate PDF documents
properly (using Adobe's tools), and at the moment, what's in question
is how to implement footnotes.

In case this is clearer than what I originally wrote, what I'd like
to know, specifically, is:

-- Is it possible to link a footnote at the bottom of a page with its
corresponding text (in the document body) so as to give the user the
choice to navigate between the two?

-- If this kind of linked navigation is not possible, and I do want
the notes at the bottom of the page (which is what the convention in
the industry of my client is), what's the next best practice?

I suppose one could bookmark one's place, read the note, and then
return to reading the body text via the bookmark, but that seems like
a work-around.

If you read the Accessify Forum post I initially cited, you'll see
that there are conflicting opinions about how this is to be done, and
my hope is that, since 2008, Adobe may have made this easier.

As I suggested earlier, I'd really love to see a PDF document in
which footnotes are implemented in the best way that Adobe tools,
alone, permit.

Thanks, and I regret that this seems to require so much explanation.
I hoped it'd be fairly simple.

Jennifer
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