WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Emphasized Text in PDFs

for

From: Lucy Greco
Date: Oct 22, 2013 1:12PM

Hello:
Even though the html supports the strong and ... screen readers and or
other AT do not recognize it in any way and it never comes over to us.

Lucia Greco
Web Access Analyst
IST-Campus Technology Services
University of California, Berkeley
(510) 289-6008 skype: lucia1-greco
http://webaccess.berkeley.edu
Follow me on twitter @accessaces


-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of David
Ashleydale
Sent: Tuesday, October 22, 2013 12:09 PM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Emphasized Text in PDFs

I've been doing some research trying to figure out if there's anything
additional that PDF authors need to do in order to expose bold or
italicized text to assistive technology users. I specifically mean text
that is meant to be emphasized.

I'm coming up with blanks. It's looking to me like PDFs are different from
HTML in this regard in that in HTML, page authors are expected to use
<strong> and <em> instead of <b> and <i>. I was expecting to find that PDF
authors are supposed to add an emphasis "tag" or attribute to emphasized
words, but I'm finding no such thing.

Is it true that if text in a PDF is bold or italicized for emphasis, there
is nothing additional that the PDF author needs to do using Acrobat Pro?
No additional tags, attributes, etc.?

Thanks,
David
messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>