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Re: Untagged PDF doc with table structure

for

From: Michael Bullis
Date: Feb 18, 2015 6:06AM


I would add something you probably already know.
When you open a pdf, Adobe often only shows you three choices--infer reading
order from document, left to right, and use reading order in raw print
stream. The document may be tagged but you have to escape from the initial
choices and re-enter through the menu choice of change reading options.
Then it will often show you the tagged choice. I'm not clear why this is,
but it happens often enough that I pretty much always escape from the
initial screen and then after jaws says no document available, I go to the
edit menu and check for accessibility options. Very often, the tagged
option now appears.

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Lynn Holdsworth
Sent: Wednesday, February 18, 2015 7:36 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Untagged PDF doc with table structure

Hi all,

Apologies if PDF accessibility is off topic. If so is there a list
that covers this?

But if not ...

I open a PDF document, and Adobe Reader alerts me that it's untagged.

So I begin to peruse it using JAWS, and come across a table whose
structure is robust enough for me to move around it using the JAWS
table keystrokes.

Does this mean there *are* tags in the document after all? Or has
Adobe Reader used heuristics to add tags to improve the doc's
accessibility, since my settings flag up that I'm using a
screenreader?

I tried to download a trial version of Acrobat Pro so as to examine
the document structure, but the download assistant seems inaccessible.

Thanks as always, Lynn