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Making older PDFs accessible

for

From: Laurie Kamrowski-Lamb
Date: Feb 20, 2019 11:28AM

Hi all!

I'm new to the forum, and I work for a small community college and have
been tasked with updating all previous PDFs created by the school for
accessibility. I am working with the table editor in Adobe Acrobat DC Pro
Continuous Release, on a Windows 10 machine. I am using
NVDA to check everything.

The majority of the project is that:

1) I can only work with Metadata
2) I cannot alter or change anything because these particular PDFs are the
official meeting minutes of the board of directors

The biggest problem that I am encountering are multi-level deep complex
tables (I have an example image if anyone wants to look but wasn't sure
about attaching it directly to the list serv) that are financial in nature.
In addition to other things such as power point and 'Statements of
revenues and expenses', etc..

So here are my questions:

1) How reliable is the accessibility check in Adobe Acrobat? I have been
having multiple crashes a day when I work with the larger tables.

2) Is there a way to manually encode the tables metadata? I am having
multiple issues where, for an unknown reason, the tables are either
skipping lines or occupying two or three rows, with no rhyme or reason. Is
there a different program to be able to encode these tables or is there a
way to manually encode these?

Any and all input or advice is more than welcome and appreciated,

Laurie