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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 12:56PM

Good questions. Who do we ask...the individual developers or the ISO
committee developing the technical specifications?

If everyone is mis-interpreting the standards it stands to reason that the
standards aren't clear. We should be able to open a PDF document and have a
consistent experience if it has been tagged. Even if it is just tagged,
there are elements that would be consistently accessible before remediation.
As I stated in my comparison of the Tables of Content tagging, a TOC was
tagged so that we could read a TOCI item and be clear as to the topic and
page number in October 2018 from an accessible Word document, now we can't.

If developers are trying to implement a standard not yet published or
adopted by legislation, how can they code for a moving target? And why?

And...I never thought I'd be saying this...if this is the future of PDF
"accessibility" can we afford to spend time making PDF accessible or should
we look at other file formats that are not going backward in accessibility
support? We shouldn't have to pay a large remediation service provider to
make our PDF documents accessible or spend hours ourselves to make PDF
accessible if we start with accessible content to begin with.

Should our focus be on tools that convert PDF to readable and understandable
content bypassing security settings? We may lose the rich layout but at
least we would have access to the content we need when we need it.

Apologies for sounding so frustrated, I've been testing documents in the
various applications for a week now and am ready to just stop reading PDF.
Time for a break! Will be working in Word for the next week or so....

Cheers, Karen