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Re: Word To PDF Accessibility: What Does and Does Not Transmit From Word To PDF

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From: Karlen Communications
Date: Jun 18, 2019 9:35AM

Currently Acrobat, Microsoft, Foxit Phantom for Business and Nuance PowerPDF
Advanced are creating horrid Tables of Content. I've recently tested all of
these applications with a sample accessible Word document. If you go by the
PAC 3 checker, you have to add Alt Text to every TOCI item that has a <Link>
Tag which means that in a list of links, you no longer have access to the
page numbers.

If you don't add Alt Text to EVERY link in a TOC, at the present time, all
applications mentioned above are truncating a TOC so that you hear something
like "List item, Link, Introduction, dot, dot, dot" and if you use Ctrl +
Down Arrow or just the Down Arrow you hear "link, dot, dot, dot, page
number." This is also how a TOC appears in a list of links...in pieces.

If you are using Word 365 subscription desktop applications you can now
indicate in Word that images are decorative/Artifacts which do transfer to
Artifacts in a PDF document but are not backward compatible if you send the
document to someone who does not have the same version of Word that you
do/earlier version.

Likewise, in recent versions of Word, you can use the Table Tools, Design
Ribbon to identify Row First Row and Column Headers but that too is not
backward compatible with other versions of Word and I've found the correct
tagging of the TH Tag to be something that needs checking.

Footnotes, Endnotes and Cross-references in all of the above mentioned
applications are a mess once an accessible Word document is converted to
tagged PDF. All of the reference information gets lumped together under one
Tag and it is all read at once when you encounter the first Footnote or
Endnote on a page in a PDF document. In Word, these are accessible using
keyboard commands to move between Footnotes and Endnotes and the main body
of the document where you found each Footnote or Endnote. (I'm using the
JAWS screen reader but there are Ribbon Commands to move back and forth as
well).

With any images, you will always get a Bounding Box issue if you use PAC 3
on a PDF from an accessible Word document. While not having much to do with
the accessibility of the PDF, the only solution, other than using a third
party remediation tool, is to make the images Artifacts, then Tag them again
and add the Alt Text...again.

The Title Style, which should have been used for the title of the document
will need to be made a <H1> Tag although in older versions of Word, this was
in place and I noticed in the last few weeks it is back again but there were
a few years when the Title Style was a <P> Tag in a PDF.

If you choose to embed the fonts in the Word document, often Acrobat Pro DC
will tell you the fonts need to be embedded again. If you correctly use the
Paragraph dialog to add space before or after text like Headings, you will
see that something called ArialMT has been added to your document for those
spaces in the PDF document and it gets flagged by the Acrobat "verify PDF/UA
conformance" tool. Also note that you can use the "Analyze and fix" tool in
Acrobat to fix any syntax errors and add the PDF/UA identifier to your PDF
document but since this tool doesn't check for the unique ID's in table
cells or Alt Text on images or links, you will still fail PAC 3 but have the
PDF/UA identifier on your document and I can't find a way to remove it.

Those are some of the things I find. It really depends on the version of
Word you have, what you need to take a closer look at and what tools you use
in Acrobat Pro DC.

Oh, within the past year, the language has correctly been identified as
plain "English" in the Advanced tab of the Document Properties dialog
instead of localized languages which force the use of a different
voice/pronunciation of words. So now, and I think it is in both Acrobat Pro
DC and the Microsoft tagging tool, the language is generic which means we
can use the synthesized voice we are used to.

Microsoft adds the <Document> Tag at the top of the Tags Tree, Acrobat Pro
DC still does not. Microsoft has the initial view set to Document Title,
Acrobat does not.

I've noticed recently/past few weeks that I have to go and check the Tab
Order if the document has links and/or form controls. For years this was set
by default to "use document structure" but now it sometimes jogs out of that
mode and I have to reset it. Not a consistent issue, but don't be surprised
if you see it.

Just thinking off the top of my head. There are probably things I've missed.

Cheers, Karen