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Re: Accessible fillable form PDF - samples? testing methodology?

for

From: chagnon@pubcom.com
Date: Nov 11, 2020 3:07PM

There are 2 issues in your question:
1) What's required to make an accessible PDF Form, per the combination of
PDF/UA-1 and WCAG accessibility standards.
2) How well does NVDA (and other screen readers) recognize and process a
compliant PDF form.

For #1, there are 3 resources:
- Karen McCall's book on accessible PDF forms
(https://www.karlencommunications.com/products.htm).

- PubCom's online course in making accessible PDF forms
(https://www.pubcom.com/classes/508-classes.shtml#formsINDD). We'll have a
session in January-February, after the holidays. (Disclosure, PubCom is my
consulting and training firm.)

- Rob Haverty's (Adobe) seminars at Accessing Higher Ground (last year
https://accessinghigherground.org/introduction-to-accessible-pdf-documents-2
/)


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Bevi Chagnon | Designer, Accessibility Technician | <EMAIL REMOVED>
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PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing
consulting . training . development . design . sec. 508 services
Upcoming classes at www.PubCom.com/classes
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-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of
Christine Hogenkamp
Sent: Wednesday, November 11, 2020 3:59 PM
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Accessible fillable form PDF - samples? testing
methodology?

Hi everyone,

I am working on testing some fillable form PDFs for their accessibility,
namely can they be used with NVDA with the proper keyboard interaction,
focus and labels, so that someone using a screen reader could reasonably
fill out the form successfully without frustration or confusion. Does
anyone know where I can find a good example of a properly labelled, tagged,
etc accessible fillable form PDF, for me to use as my guide for how NVDA
should ideally be reading out the form elements?

Or if anyone knows of articles about how to test a fillable form and what
behavior the form should display when using NVDA, that would be great too!
Right now I have a few PDFs that pass the Acrobat accessibility checker (I
know, it only has limited value in itself ha ha) but aren't reading out in
NVDA as clearly as they could be (probably lack of clear input labelling) or
not smoothly moving by keyboard between the inputs and labels or other text
around the input spaces. It's possible that I, a sighted user testing with
NVDA, am missing how I should be moving within the form by keyboard that a
regular NVDA user would know already, so I am happy to learn how to improve
my testing to be more natural if possible.

Thanks in advance for any help,

*===*
*Christine Hogenkamp*
Front-end Developer

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