WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Accessible PDFs from Google Doc/Presentation

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom.com
Date: Jan 7, 2016 10:34AM

Printing to the virtual PDF printer that's installed with Acrobat and other Acrobat-clones (File/Print/Acrobat PDF) creates a very different document than other methods, such as an export to PDF utility.

When you select print to PDF, you are encoding the document the same way it gets physically printed on a laser printer; the architectural structure of the document that's "under the hood" is very different from what we need in a accessible or digital PDF. Visual appearance is the same, but not the coding.

So use Print to PDF as a last resort, knowing that you'll need to spend quite a bit of time to remediate it for accessibility. Instead, use the source software's export, save as, or convert to PDF, which triggers a different engine that makes the PDF than the Print to PDF method.

At this time, Adobe's products still reign supreme for PDFs, whether you need a press-quality one for sending to the print shop, or an accessible one for electronic distribution. The PDF format is in the ISO public domain, but no company has matched Adobe's commitment and expertise...regardless of how much money the others spend on advertising to convince the public otherwise.

—Bevi Chagnon

— — —
Bevi Chagnon | www.PubCom.com | <EMAIL REMOVED>
Technologists, Consultants, Trainers, Designers, and Developers
for publishing & communication
| PRINT | WEB | PDF | EPUB | Sec. 508 ACCESSIBILITY |
— — —



-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Kelly Lupo
Sent: Thursday, January 7, 2016 11:29 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Accessible PDFs from Google Doc/Presentation

I don't know about the accessibility of doing it this way, but have you tried "printing" the document to PDF using something like Foxit Reader or Adobe Reader's printer option?

As an aside, are there better PDF printing options? I haven't looked at this yet, but I definitely need to implement a better PDF printer program and PDF converter program (preferably free/low-cost) for our office...

Kelly

On Thu, Jan 7, 2016 at 11:13 AM, Mickey Williamson < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Has anyone had success in creating accessible PDFs out of a Google Doc
> or Google Presentation? I download the document as a PDF and it opens fine.
> But when I attempt to add tags, I get "Bad PDF; error in processing fonts.
> <cannot find CMap resource file>" or "Bad PDF; error in processing fonts.
> <bad Type0 font>" depending on whether it comes from Docs or Presentation.
> My test document I'm using for this has nothing but one word in the
> Arial font. A google search has yielded nothing. :-(
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> Mickey