WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: PDF tagged or not?

for

From: L Snider
Date: Apr 5, 2018 1:48PM

Hi Bevi and Josh,

Josh, the tags were okay for a multiple of screen readers, which is good!

Bevi, the Word was converted to PDF and the InDesign was converted to PDF
and then the two were put together (and I don't know which one was put into
which). I don't know which one was tagged, one of them must have been
tagged for the tags to exist (from what I know tagging wasn't done after in
Pro).

Yes, I have played with the Word>InDesign myself and it seems to be okay.

The workflow you mentioned was scary!

This isn't my workflow, but I have seen this before a few times, but not
the weird tags issue...

Any ideas? It was odd...

Cheers

Lisa



On Tue, Apr 3, 2018 at 10:08 PM, < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> > On 2018-04-03 11:05 AM, L Snider wrote:
> > > I have run into a PDF that has tags (done in Word and then added
> > > pages in InDesign or similar) in the Tag Window but the Checker says
> > > it isn't tagged and the Properties box says there are no tags.
>
> Wait, wait...
> What's the workflow here?
> Trying to interpret what you wrote, is it this?
>
> 1) Make the Word document.
> 2) Export it as a tagged PDF.
> 3) Place the tagged PDF into InDesign and add more pages to the InDesign
> document.
> 4) Export the whole enchilada from InDesign to a new tagged PDF.
>
> At this time, when a PDF is placed into an InDesign layout (a.k.a. a
> nested PDF) and re-exported as a PDF, the nested PDF comes out as a graphic
> in the final PDF and is not accessible, other than treating it like a
> graphic and putting Alt-text on it.
>
> At this time, this is not a valid workflow.
>
> You can, however, import any Word document (accessible or not) into
> InDesign, lay out the document, and export it as a fully accessible PDF,
> which actually is the most common workflow for InDesign.
>
> Question: why are you making a PDF from Word in the first place? If the
> content is going to be placed into InDesign, why not place/import the
> actual Word file?
>



>
> — — —
> Bevi Chagnon, founder/CEO | <EMAIL REMOVED>
> — — —
> PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing
> consulting ' training ' development ' design ' sec. 508 services
> Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes
> — — —
>
>