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Re: Z-Order and Tag Order Need to Match?

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From: Karlen Communications
Date: May 28, 2020 6:53AM

My comments are prefaced by acknowledging that the majority of document authors still don't know how to or won't create well designed and structured digital content.

However, this week I received my second PDF with the PDF/UA Identifier on it that is not accessible. Headings were not tagged and paragraphs were broken into two paragraph tags whether they were in the middle of the page or at the bottom of one page and continued on the top of another. My previous tagged PDF with the PDF/UA Identifier on it had the entire first page in a list tag with the entire contents of the first page in a list item tag...Headings, paragraphs, lists, images...everything. Additionally this second document with the PDF/UA Identifier on it had empty nested paragraph tags three deep. I didn't think this was "allowed" in PDF or PDF/UA.

NONE of the automated tools caught this including PAC 3. I thought at first that it may be because of the PDF/UA identifier that none of the automated accessibility checkers were finding these problems with the tags. I removed the PDF/UA identifier and ran the automated accessibility checkers again, including PAC 3. All told me that I had an accessible document when I could see that there were some structural/semantic violation in the Tags Tree. So, not the fault of an inexperienced remediator or someone who just runs the automated tools...they were told that the semantics were conforming.

While it is true that document authors play an important role, maybe the most important as they create the digital content, and there are several tools that create tagged PDF, it is becoming more difficult to get clean Tags in PDF documents even if you start with an accessible source document. We are inundated with what I call garbage tags that simply bloat the Tags Tree with endless nested Tags that shouldn't be nested. As with the two previously mentioned documents, they weren't complex, even if I had used the auto tag feature in any of the conversion tools, I should not have the results I had (with the exception of the headings not being tagged, which is why you go down the Tags Tree or use the Order Panel to see what got tagged and what didn't).

I agree with Lisa and others who echo that we have regressed in terms of accessible PDF. We stopped moving toward accessible PDF about five years ago when we started seeing the tagging anomalies that were and aren't easy to remediate.

As I've stated before, either the specs are being misinterpreted by all developers or the specs aren't "right" which is resulting in what we are experiencing as end-users of PDF and remediators of PDF.

To the point of tools not representing the semantic structure, the tools that let those of us with disabilities add what I call "virtual tags" to untagged documents do just this thing...they go through the untagged PDF and guess at what is there then render it to us as they find it...which is often not in a logical reading order and results can vary each time we open the same PDF...but it is a tool that bridges that gap between tagged and untagged PDF. Not sure if anything has been done to improve its guessing over the past 20 years.

Read Out Loud, when it was added to Acrobat and Reader, was a light version of PDF Aloud...one of the benefits of being around in pre-historic PDF times is having asked about the tool and received that answer as to where it came from. Again, nothing in any of the PDF tools that use this feature has developed this tool past its point of being added.

We reached a crossroads in PDF accessibility about five years ago and unfortunately, based on what most of us are seeing in the conversion and tagging tools, we went down the wrong path. We made a good start but lost our way.

Since it is clear that we have adaptive technology that uses either the Tags Tree or the Reading Order, we need to have communication between those two panels to make sure that the adaptive technologies render the same reading experience no matter which panel they are using...not sure how we do that when we can't get a clean Tags Tree. If we clean up the Tags Tree, would it then clean up the Order Panel information/architectural view of the document? How do we influence the specs to get both working together so we can fix things in one panel and have them accurately reflected in the other??

At this point there are more questions than answers.

Cheers, Karen