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Re: How is PDF accessibility evaluated?

for

From: Olaf Drümmer
Date: Feb 9, 2015 11:06AM

The PDF standard (PDF 1.7, as defined in ISO 32000-1) says in the context of the Tagged PDF provisions:

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The graphics objects in a document can be divided into two classes:

• The real content of a document comprises objects representing material originally introduced by the document’s author.

• Artifacts are graphics objects that are not part of the author’s original content but rather are generated by the conforming writer in the course of pagination, layout, or other strictly mechanical processes.

(copied from ISO 32000-1, Document management — Portable document format — Part 1: PDF 1.7, 14.8.2.2 Real Content and Artifacts)

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PDF has a mechanism to mark a piece of content as being an artifact. Assistive technology or content conversion tools would then by default not bother to present such artifact content to a user or export it to some other representation. At the same time there are mechanisms in PDF that make it possible to classify artifacts - e.g. whether an artifact is a page background, or a page number, or a running header, etc. - in case a user wanted to access these anyway.



Olaf




On 9 Feb 2015, at 18:38, "Stanzel, Susan - FSA, Kansas City, MO" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> In one of these message it was mentioned to tag the image as an artifact. What is an artifact?