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FW: PDF Accessibility

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From: Anya Levysmith
Date: Jun 26, 2013 2:59PM

I sent this yesterday, but I did not see it posted. Is there anything
else I need to do to post a question to the list?



Thanks.



From: Anya Levysmith
Sent: Tuesday, June 25, 2013 1:24 PM
To: ' <EMAIL REMOVED> '
Subject: PDF Accessibility



Hello,



I have a few questions about making PDFs accessible. My task is to take
old, inaccessible PDFs and make them accessible, hopefully without
having to recreate them in Word or InDesign. I have Acrobat XI, and I
understand the steps of going through all of the actions to add
language, tags, reading order, alt tags on images, etc. What I don't
really understand is what my tags should actually be and how to fix
them. For example, when I run the Accessibilty check on the document,
it passes, but when I view the tags, they don't make sense to me. I am
usually not lucky enough to get simple <H#s> and <Ps>, instead I get
<Normal> <1stpara><P> with one line of the paragraph instead of the
entire paragraph or even just a carriage return. Usually my bulleted
lists turn out as some kind of paragraph style. Do I need to go through
every tag and change the properties on it to make it perfect, like HTML,
or if it passes the Accessbility check and the reading order is OK, is
that sufficient? I do try using NVDA on the document, and going through
the headings to make sure at least those seem right, and it does read
aloud correctly, but I am not really sure how far to go. We have a lot
of long PDFs on our site and there is no chance they will be converted
to HTML and I don't want to get into a political discussion about
whether PDFs can be accessible. I want to provide what is both legally
required and what is desirable to the users.



I have read all the info on WebAIM PDFs and many other sites, but I am
not finding a definitive answer.



Thanks in advance for any help.