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Re: Do Word Forms Convert Accessibly To PDF?

for

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Apr 5, 2019 3:52PM

In March, I sat in on two webinars on creating Accessible PDF Forms led
by Rob Haverty from Adobe. If I recall correctly, in one session he
mentioned that it isn't currently possible for exclusively screen reader
users to complete all aspects of accessible form creation.

The problem I think is that form fields "float" in the annotations
layer, which doesn't have any landmarks in the tag or content tree. So
there is currently no way for a screen reader to verify or locate the
position of such form fields on the visual page.

Much of the work involved with making a fillable PDF into an accessible
PDF involves creating these floating fields (or locating pre-existing
ones) and tagging them as form fields and then moving those Form tags
into the correct location in the tag tree.

I suppose if you used a very well-formatted Word document as the source
and then used Acrobat to automatically identify form fields, and all the
fields were correctly identified with correctly inferred field names in
the correct order, then you might be able to get away without verifying
the position of any fields or manually inserting any new fields on the
form. But that would be a very exceptional case, I would think.

Phil.

Philip Kiff
D4K Communications

On 2019-04-05 16:19, Jim Homme wrote:
> Hi,
> Can a screen reader user successfully make form fields and make them accessible in Adobe Pro?
>
> Thanks.
>
> Jim
>
>
>
> ==========
> Jim Homme
> Digital Accessibility
> Bender Consulting Services
> 412-787-8567
> https://www.benderconsult.com/our%20services/hightest-accessible-technology-solutions
>
>