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Re: Artifact tag vs. Change tag to artifact in Acrobat

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From: Karlen Communications
Date: Mar 7, 2020 8:59AM

An Artifact Tag that needs to be Artifacted will and is, creating more
remediation work which increases the cost of remediation. While it is a nice
thought" that adaptive technology will "catch up" and give us an option to
hear "Artifact" and line numbers are a great example of something that
perhaps we need access to at various times for specific documents, those of
us with disabilities and other stakeholders seem to be missing in the
process of creating PDF standards. Even those of us who speak up are not
heard.

With this Artifact Tag, how do those of us who are using adaptive technology
identify something like line numbers from decorative items on a page. With
the example of an image marked as decorative, having no meaningful
contribution to the content of the document being read to us as "Artifact,
pathpathpath" how does this improve our experience in accessing content from
what is already an overwhelmingly inaccessible file format due to the amount
of untagged PDF content out there? How many items in our adaptive technology
settings/options are we going to have to go through in order to just read a
PDF?

Why not have a <LineNum> Tag?

Given that since Office 2007, in Word, parts of table gridlines are housed
in <Span> Tags, <TR>, <TH>, <TD> Tags or just loosely put under a <Table>
Tag, does the implementation of the Artifact Tag mean that now we have to
hear all of the parts of table gridlines...or underline...or paragraph
borders...just thinking of the amount of "stuff" on a page or in a document
that one normally wouldn't "look at" but we will be forced to listen to
until adaptive technology or IF adaptive technology catches up, makes me
want to just convert any PDF that I get to something that I can actually
read quickly, efficiently and not fall behind in education or employment.

Is the PDF Association and the ISO committees reaching out to adaptive
technology developers to work PDF - 2 into a development cycle? Having a
standard that no one understands or knows about doesn't really help those of
us with disabilities access PDF content.

We still don't have a way to let us know how much of a document is redacted
although I am repeatedly told that the ISO standard gives a clear way of
doing this. Visually someone can see the amount of space in a document that
has been redacted. Those of us using adaptive technology need to be able to
"see" the same thing. How many adaptive technology developers have
implemented the ISO "solution?"

I'd really like to see the PDF standards developed with those of us who use
adaptive technology and have to access PDF documents in mind and the
"machines" doing the conversion to PDF create the output for "us." So far,
the machines seem to be winning.

Cheers, Karen


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of
Philip Kiff
Sent: Friday, March 6, 2020 4:26 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Artifact tag vs. Change tag to artifact in Acrobat

I've seen Artifact tags start to pop up in files as well. I hadn't quite
pinned down what was going on, but following Jon's suggestion, I just now
performed a quick test with Word 365 (16.0.12527.20170) 32-bit and when you
generate a PDF using their built-in PDF conversion engine, images that you
have checked with the "Mark as decorative" setting seem to be tagged with
the Artifact tag in the tag tree via the rolemap.

Like Bev, I have found myself having to artifact the Artifact tags in some
documents. "Crazy" is right! And I echo her general complaint about the
frustration we find ourselves in these days where the different stakeholders
are not coordinating their efforts very well.

Phil.

On 2020-03-06 14:38, Jonathan Avila wrote:
> Last year when I converted from Word using the Acrobat plugin I started to
see the artifact tag show up in the role mappings section. At one point it
was mapping certain tags to artifact tags.
>
> Jon
On 2020-03-06 15:27, <EMAIL REMOVED> wrote:
> [....] This is a good example of the lack of coordination between all the
stakeholders: the standards committees, PDF software producers, and
assistive technologies.
>
> They all have to get on the same page of the hymnal in order to provide
any benefit to the end users.
>
> When we get complaints from clients and end users about them, we artifact
out the <Artifact> tags. Crazy.
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