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Re: questions re converting PDFs to HTML (WordPress) and accessible footnote plugins

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From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Nov 4, 2016 10:47PM

I noticed that many of the article PDFs on the agency's website are from other publishers, such as medical journals.

You need to check with the publishers of these articles to verify that they'll let you republish their material in another format (HTML versus their PDF and with a different appearance) or you could violate their copyright. Keep in mind that as you convert them from PDF to HTML, regardless of the tool you use, you could be altering the content or the conversion could mistakenly alter it, such as dropping characters or special symbols.

PDFs can be made accessible. Ideally, the accessibility should be built in the original source file, which could be either Word or InDesign. Then the PDF is mostly compliant needing only minimal remediation in Acrobat Pro.

--Bevi Chagnon

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Donna Blumberg
Sent: Friday, November 4, 2016 10:36 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] questions re converting PDFs to HTML (WordPress) and accessible footnote plugins

I'm part of a volunteer team that formed for an annual contest http://air-rallies.org/; we are building an accessible website for a nonprofit. Our nonprofit has a website, http://www.autismismedical.com/ which they want us to redo to be accessible; we are recreating this site in WordPress. Their content is mostly PDFs of medical articles; that is all we have to work with. The articles (such as the ones at
http://www.autismismedical.com/gastroenterology.html#sthash.1Wntc5DS.dpbs)
are fairly complex, with tables, images, citations and numerous footnotes.
We're working to convert some of these to WordPress posts; we'll remediate others as PDFs.

Here are my questions:

- Are there any tips or best practices to converting complex PDFs to
HTML? We're converting them to Word or and then are doing copy/paste; this
is very time consuming as often the conversion isn't clean (typos etc).
We're creating posts using Advanced Custom Fields to separate and format
the various sections (journal, abstract, body etc). Some of these articles
are lengthy and have many footnotes or citations.

- which footnote plugin(s) are the most accessible? We're currently
using Easy Footnotes, https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-footnotes/

- any other thoughts or recommendations?