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Help with a fillable PDF form

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From: Alan Zaitchik
Date: Sep 11, 2017 4:09PM

I am working on a 49 page PDF that is essentially a series of forms, more
or less 3 kinds of forms that repeat 12 times.
The document was saved as PDF from an InDesign document, and I have no
access to that original (and cannot go back any steps before the PDF in my
possession). So all I have is the PDF, and the only tool I have is Acrobat
Pro DC.

I would very much appreciate help about the following:
The PDF included countless tables with odd TH and TD elements containing
form elements (radio buttons, text areas, and checkboxes) and labels
strewn across the table structures. I tried various experiments with the
Acrobat Identify Form Fields and Autotag tools, but although (almost) all
form fields are recognized and tagged as OBJR elements the structure is
(a) semantically outrageous in using tables to begin with, (b) it's
illegitimate AFAIK since Forms are not allowed to be nested inside Tables
- maybe I am wrong about that one, please advise- (c) each form element is
inside its own Form in its own TD, which makes so sense, and MOST
importantly (d) neither JAWS nor NVDA announces the labels (actually the
text in the adjacent TD) together with the form fields.

Anyway, I am painfully restructuring and retagging the document with List
structures inside Forms, putting each Form element (radio button OBJR,
checkbox OBJR, etc.) inside an <LBody> that includes the text label for
the element.

As a sanity test of this approach I tried my inexperienced hand with JAWS
and NVDA with a fragment of the entire file - but I am having a very hard
time moving through the document in either screen reader. I worry that in
the end the document will be no more accessible to a JAWS user than
before. That is the real goal here, and I fear I will miss it no matter
how careful I retag the elements.

I would be more than happy to pay out of my own pocket a few bucks to
anyone experienced with JAWS - and how to fix the problems in Acrobat
(since that is the only tool I have available at this point), for (1)
testing the PDF in JAWS and telling me if it is actually accessible to a
JAWS user or viciously unfriendly, and (2) giving me a detailed example of
how to retag a few of the forms in the document to get adequate results.
(I wouldn't expect more than an example I can copy for each of the 3 types
of forms, and I would be happy if the testing in JAWS were confined to a
few sample pages.) There is no budget for doing any of this on the
project's money, so I'm paying out of pocket just because I am stubbornly
committed to making this (and other) PDFs actually accessible, not just ok
according to the Acrobat Accessibility Checker.

If you are interested please reach me at <EMAIL REMOVED> .

Thanks!

Alan