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Re: Accessibility assessment of pdfs.

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Oct 24, 2012 4:11PM

As with all automated testing, the CommonLook tool can only perform some of
the necessary tests with certainty. For instance it may be able to tell if a
document does not contain any headings at all, but if there are heading tags
it can't tell if they have been applied properly. It can check that images
have alternate text but it cannot tell if that text is appropriate.

To test PDFs fully, it is necessary to do some degree of manual testing, and
that is often prohibitively expensive. If that's a route you want to go
down, we offer that service as do others on this list. Fixing them is even
more expensive, and again there are several of us who can help with that.

Where you have a lot of legacy PDFs, a pragmatic approach might be to test
them all with an automated tool and test a small sample manually to get a
general assessment of the quality of tagging (if indeed they are tagged).
You will then know how good they could be made and if they are fixable at
all - sometimes they are not, depending on how they were authored.

Next, look at your server logs to see how often they are downloaded and
which are the most popular. If the figures are high you may choose to fix
the most popular ones. The rest I recommend you leave, and put a notice on
the website saying you will provide an accessible version on demand within a
reasonable timescale.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Nancy Johnson
Sent: 24 October 2012 14:26
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Accessibility assessment of pdfs.

Hi

I have a request from my company to do an accessibility assessment of pdfs
on their sites.

Since we are an engineering division only do technical accessibility and not
content accessibility, We do not have anything to do with PDFs, videos or
other content related items. There may be 100 or more pdfs on each site...
some may be recent, some old.

Question1: is there any software that could globally look at all the pdfs
on the site or page globally and identify those which are not tagged
correctly. Some may go back before Office 2007.

Question2: Three years ago the site added a dynamic pdf form. This is xml
database driven form, with little static content. I was told at the time,
there was no way to get proper tags on it. Does anyone know if there has
been a change.

Thanks,

Nancy
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