WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

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

for

From: Duff Johnson
Date: Jun 30, 2019 2:30PM

> Duff, here's great example of the problems we're seeing on the Adobe open forums.
> https://forums.adobe.com/message/11130092

I finally got to reading this. What a mess.

> Having been through similar problems in our shop, I'm leaning toward it being software problems with any combination of these programs:
>
> —The source (authoring) program, such as MS Word or Adobe InDesign.
>
> —The conversion utility that created the PDF, such as PDF Maker (Acrobat Ribbon) or MS export utility.
>
> —Acrobat DC Pro, which she's using to check and correct the PDF.
>
> —The screen reader software programs.
>
> It's like looking for a needle buried in a haystack.

There are several issues here.

- Authoring software (in the 2nd example) is making PDFs without word-spacing (not mentioned in the writeup, which makes me wonder how they are testing, since they didn't mention this problem).

- The author misunderstands the structure elements they are using… for example, they are wrapping a sentence of text in an <Lbl> element, which is just dead wrong regardless of their claim that the file conforms to PDF/UA. This isn't the right way to use a <Lbl> element.

- But it's also true that the reader implementations (accessibility API and/or AT) are letting them down as well… that "link" shouldn't be there, for one thing.

Philip Kiff's comment is accurate (so far as I can tell).

Duff.