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Re: More problems with tables, PDF, and screen readers

for

From: glen walker
Date: Apr 3, 2018 7:19PM

We've run into the Acrobat setting for large documents before but it
sounded like this was a separate issue. I made a simple table in Word that
spanned several pages. When I saved as PDF, the resulting tagged PDF had a
<table> tag on every page with its own <thead> and <tbody>, so there was
literally one table per page. That sounds like a bug in Word.

I hand edited the PDF and moved all the <tbody> tags into the first table
then deleted all the remain <table> tags (and their subsequent <thead>
tags). It didn't work perfectly but at least now the screen reader only
saw one table with a bunch of rows, just like it was in Word. I'm sure I
could tweak it some more but the concept seemed to work.

But hand editing isn't a viable solution for large documents or a large
number of documents. Perhaps you might have luck contacting MS directly
(stifled laugh), although if you call with an accessibility issue, maybe
they'll be responsive. If the Word doc only has one table in it, the
resulting PDF should only have one table in it.


On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 5:22 PM, Jonathan Avila < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> Alan, Acrobat has a setting to deliver only a single page's contents to
> screen readers when a threshold number of pages is met. See Acrobat > Edit
> > preferences > reading > Screen reader Options > for large documents only
> read the currently visible page. The default is 50. This is a user
> setting. Try changing this option to read the entire document or adjust
> the threshold and see if that makes a difference.
>
> Jonathan
>
> Jonathan Avila
> Chief Accessibility Officer
> Level Access
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
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