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RE: Accessible PDFs

for

From: julian.rickards
Date: May 14, 2003 7:26AM

Melanie wrote:

> Is it possible to add tags manually? Or, is this not possible?

Unless you can edit the code of the PDF directly, I don't think you can add
the tags manually. You can, using the Tags palette, apply a tag to a block
but this is a very tedious method. If you have some legacy PDFs, you can
apply the Make Accessible plugin which will tag the text but as far as I
know, it tags every block of text with the paragraph tag which means that
there would not be any heading tags.

If you have legacy word processing documents and you can PDF them from their
original application, then you can use the Make Accessible plugin on the
PDF.

> I see that Word97 generates the tags very nicely, but how about legacy
> documents? Is there any hope for converting those to
> accessible Pdf's. Or,
> would the only method be to take the text out of the PDF, put
> it into word,
> then convert back to PDF?

Really? I was told (and know from experience) that Word97 does not create a
tagged PDF. The problem is that the document structure information does not
transfer from Word97 to Acrobat so Acrobat cannot tag it.

However, a Word97 document can be opened in Word2000/2002 and an Accessible
PDF can be created from the same document using these more recent versions
of the application. Word2000/2002 *does* send the document structure to
Acrobat and therefore can create Accessible PDFs.

HTH,

Jules


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