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Re: Tagging issues with Acrobat Pro DC

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From: Karlen Communications
Date: Apr 11, 2019 1:34PM

If you look at my research, people responding to my annual surveys, both people with disabilities who need to read PDF and people remediating PDF to be accessible, PDF is still the bane of everyone's existence due to inconsistent tagging, lack of tagging, time spent in tagging, lack of headings for navigation, lack of sequential headings and each time I run the surveys, either HTML or EPUB are mentioned as a file format less inaccessible than PDF.

"we" still have a long way to go to sell the format as a viable accessible format for people with disabilities who use adaptive technology to access digital content. Given the plethora of PDF out there that aren't tagged, "we" encounter those more often than we encounter PDF that we can actually read.

One example I give is of a book chapter I contributed to last year. I had to research digital accessibility and inclusion and of the 70, yes seventy, PDF documents I found related to digital accessibility and inclusion of people with disabilities, 5 were tagged, 3 just tagged and let loose on the web so were unreadable and only 2 were tagged in a way that I could read them and have a coherent view of what the document author was trying to say.

The irony was not lost on me.

One of the other common comments in my surveys from both people with disabilities and PDF remediators is that no one is listening to our needs.

My guess would be that there is also a gap in communication among all stakeholders in this conversation that goes unattended.

Cheers, Karen