WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: PDF with multimedia/audio

for

From: Karen McCall
Date: Apr 21, 2022 6:49AM

I would think this fails WCAG (and PDF/UA 1) on several levels.

If a PDF is not tagged, it is not accessible.

Tags have to be the correct tag for the content and in a logical reading order.

While Adobe Reader and other PDF Viewers have the ability to try to render content to "trusted adaptive technology", this is different each time you open the same PDF. There is no way to tell if content is missing or in any logical order...that's what the tags do.

I created a book a few years ago with tutorial videos in it to demonstrate the inaccessibility of this type of content presentation. Multimedia does have to be added before the tags because annotations are created when multimedia is added correctly...although you could try to add multimedia to a tagged PDF using the "Find Unmarked Annotations" capability.

We see similar accessibility barriers when forms have form controls but no tags. It is the tags that connect everything and make the PDF usable (accessible).

The biggest problem is trying to find a way for keyboard navigation to the multimedia followed by an equally large problem of being able to use the player with the keyboard and/or adaptive technology within the PDF viewer.

This solution is similar to the wrong approach of having a scanned image of a document with either the Alt Text or the Actual Text attribute on each page. You can't navigate by heading, understand structure or quickly find what you want.

It is wrong on so many levels and for so many checkpoints in both WCAG and PDF/UA 1.

Cheers, Karen