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Testing PDfs for accessiblilty

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From: Alan Zaitchik
Date: Jul 17, 2017 4:28PM

I have finally convinced my superiors that it's time we look at tools
other than Acrobat Pro for testing and remediating issues with PDFs.
They prefer, obviously, not to spend money, but might be cajoled into a
small investment. I'm sure better tools will save money almost immediately
given the inordinate amount of time I am spending at present with Acrobat.

My question is: what would you recommend as an alternative to Acorbat Pro
for the various aspects of accessibility testing and remediation, in
particular the tags structures?

We get PDF documents from various sources: InDesign, Word, Powerpoint,
sometimes Excel - and sometimes we have no idea where. There is always a
crushing amount of work required to straighten out the tags, and of course
any subsequent edit of content seems to play havoc with the tags and spoil
the work done up to that point. I rely on Role Mapping, and so on, but the
fact is that the tag structure is often (usually) wildly broken. We are
very frustrated by both the Autotag feature of Acrobat as well as the
'Save as PDF' plugins in Word and Powerpoint, assuming that they bear some
of the responsibility, too, for the bad results. No matter how we try in
Word and InDesign and Powerpoint, when the document is brought into
Acrobat (and auto tagged if need be) the results are always unacceptable.

Can anyone recommend a tool that autogenerates clean tag structures that
conform to HTML5-like semantics? Is there a better way to generate PDFs
from Word, Powerpoint, etc. than the usual Save as PDF options in those
products?

Thanks for suggestions.

Alan Zaitchik

Center for Social Innovation
200 Reservoir Street
Needham, MA 02494