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Re: PDF column tag

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From: Karen McCall
Date: Jul 25, 2022 7:40AM

I agree with Bevi...avoid at all costs using the Read Out Loud "tool" in Acrobat or Reader. It is crap and we've been asking Adobe to make it a full screen reader since Acrobat 6, the version after it was introduced.

If you use the Column tool in Word (Layout Ribbon, Columns or Alt P, J) the tags will be correct in the tags tree. I use columns, both newspaper and parallel all the time. I am a person who uses a screen reader.

You would use a combination of section breaks and column breaks for some layouts using parallel columns but most of this is done automatically in Word as you design the layout and use Columns. I demonstrate this technique in my Word training. You can have a heading on the left and the associated content on the right, halfway down the page you can have an accessible sidebar with its associated text on the right.

You can check the "reading order" of columns in Word by switching to Draft view (Alt + W, E) which displays the text in a single column illustrating how the screen reader would read the text. This is not a screen reader specific view, it is a Draft, minimal view of the document contents.

PowerPoint has a Content placeholder option to put the contents of a placeholder in columns and this also translates to a correctly tagged (list tags) in PDF. Not an option I'd recommend for a slide with a lot of content but it is an option to display a list in a different, maybe more visual yet accessible manner.

Cheers, Karen