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Re: A better PDF editor for accessibility?

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Jun 11, 2013 9:50AM

According the PDF/UA standard, it is only the content order as defined in the tagging structure that counts.

The relevance of Touch Up Reading Order Tool (TUROT) is essentially a thing of the past, and only served to compensate for a not well implemented feature known as reflow in Acrobat / Adobe Reader. As it is failing to be useful most of the time anyway once you use it for non-trivial page content - TUROT order in place or not - it is not really worth taking into account anymore.

Today's noteworthy reflow tools only look at the tagging order (check out callas pdfGoHTML as one option, or check out the upcoming PDF reader for visually impaired people, from one of the Swiss organisations for blind and visually impaired people - http://www.szb.ch/presse/mitteilungen/erster-pdf-reader-fuer-sehbehinderte.html in German - use http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A//www.szb.ch/presse/mitteilungen/erster-pdf-reader-fuer-sehbehinderte.html&;hl=en&langpair=auto|en&tbb=1&ie=UTF-8 as a Google Translate based rough translation - scheduled to ship June 24, 2013, for Mac and Windows, free of charge, and supposedly going to be available in German, French, Italian and English).

So say bye-bye to TUROT and Acrobat reflow, focus on getting your tagging order right and have a productive life again, and use PDF reading tools that work well...

Olaf


On 11 Jun 2013, at 17:19, Jonathan Metz wrote:

> It happens when not using TUROT too. If a user moves content around in the
> Reading Order (RO), then tags get moved around as well. If a user
> mistakenly moves content up (instead of down) in the RO, then they run
> into another issue of having content physically hidden in the real content
> of the page (does this section have a technical name?).
>
> I always been told that making adjustments to the Reading Order was an
> essential part of fixing a page. Are you saying that the reading order not
> matter then, if we just focus on the tags? This goes against everything
> I¹ve learned in marking up a page.
>
> I¹ve sort of approached the Reading Order panel as knowing the best way to
> adjust the content on that page before ever opening the Tags Panel (unless
> there are elements that should not have been made tags like with what
> happens typically with PowerPoint slides).
>
>
> Jonathan
>
> On 6/11/13 10:53 AM, "Duff Johnson" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
>>> ... I attempted
>>> to fix the reading order manually and ran into two recurring issues.
>>>
>>> 1. I'd be in the process of changing the order, and then suddenly
>>> tags I
>>> already moved, would rearrange themselves.
>>
>> Almost certainly, because you were making adjustments using the Touch Up
>> Reading Order Tool (TUROT) after having made changes using the Tags panel.
>>
>> This sort of procedure is a no-no because the Touch Up Reading Order Tool
>> modifies both content reading order and tags simultaneously.
>>
>> If you do use the TUROT then you pretty much have to do a 2nd pass in the
>> tags panel to clean up the problems you've induced with the TUROT.
>>
>> I generally advise users to avoid this tool, especially on very complex
>> pages, and focus on the tags instead.
>>
>> Duff.
>> >> >> >
> > >