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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

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of
<EMAIL REMOVED>
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2019 2:10 PM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Word To PDF Accessibility: What Does and Does Not
Transmit From Word To PDF

The list is so-o-o long!

We're seeing a regression in accessible PDFs from any source program using
any of the available tools, not just Adobe's PDF Maker plug-in, Microsoft's
built-in converter, Fox It, Nuance Power PDF, or Axes4 PDF's utility.

The biggest problems are with Tables of Content, footnotes, and regular
tables.

Part of this comes from the development of the forthcoming PDF UA-2
standards, which are not yet completed nor published by the ISO. But
companies are beginning to build UA-2 "stuff" into their programs now, in
today's versions. Essentially, they are jumping ahead of the standard and
consequently, no A T knows how to process this stuff and present it to the
human being using the A T.

The main questions this community needs to ask and get answers for:

1. Why are we going backwards? Why are PDFs exported from Word today, with
the latest software releases, less accessible than they were 2 years ago?

2. Why do different companies interpret the standards differently? Aren't
standards supposed to, well, standardize things?

3. Any why are companies programming for UA-2 before it's ready and
released? Or even the law? Sec. 508 requires only PDF UA-1, not UA-2.

Any answers?

-Bevi

- - -
Bevi Chagnon, founder/CEO | <EMAIL REMOVED>
- - -
PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing consulting .
training . development . design . sec. 508 services Upcoming classes at
www.PubCom.com/classes
- - -
Latest blog-newsletter - Accessibility Tips at www.PubCom.com/blog

-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Jim
Homme
Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2019 10:15 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: [WebAIM] Word To PDF Accessibility: What Does and Does Not Transmit
From Word To PDF

Hi,
I'm starting to keep track of what accessibility fixes in Word need to be
redone when going to PDF. Does anyone already have notes on this? It looks
to me as though it matters what process you use to make the PDF after you
make the Word doc accessible. We have both the Adobe and the Microsoft PDF
generation facilities available to us here.

Thanks.

Jim



==========
Jim Homme
Digital Accessibility
Bender Consulting Services
412-787-8567
https://www.benderconsult.com/our%20services/hightest-accessible-technology-
solutions

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