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Re: Issues with Adobe accessibility checker converting PPTx toPDF

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From: Steve Green
Date: Feb 3, 2023 11:23AM

First I would make a couple of observations:

1. You can produce a highly accessible PDF from PowerPoint if you know what you are doing, but there are a lot of do's and don'ts. Very few people know what they are. Most of the guidance you can find is incomplete and/or incorrect.

2. It is very difficult to produce a highly accessible PDF from PowerPoint if it has already been created without following all the necessary guidelines. The built-in accessibility checker is virtually useless in this regard - it only addresses a small proportion of the things that need to be done.

It is difficult to interpret the discussion between your colleagues without seeing the PowerPoint document. I would be happy to take a look if you want to send it to me.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of <EMAIL REMOVED>
Sent: 03 February 2023 18:09
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Issues with Adobe accessibility checker converting PPTx to PDF

Hi all,



Hope your day is going well. I'm looking for some guidance regarding the aforementioned subject. One of our profs is having issues with PDF accessibility and specifically, the false positives when running the checker in Adobe. I copy here some exchanges regarding the problem they are having. But from what I understand, they are hoping to eliminate the false positives from the report as it requires more checking and it is already a lot of work. Is there anything more I can tell them, besides what has already been provided?
A little background:

After the prof reached out to an internal IT resource, they got this
answer:



"I've taken a look and I'm wondering whether you should not check off
'Enable Accessibility and Reflow with tagged Adobe PDF box' as it may be
overwriting you accessibility pieces that you have done in pptx.



That would be my first go-to in determining why this is happening and to
simply NOT select that option (Enable Accessibility and Reflow with
tagged Adobe PDF) as that option may be adding proper tags for headings,
lists, hyperlinks, and other structural elements in the PDF document
when it was already there in the pptx."



The prof then replied (please see attached screenshots):



"I followed your suggestion: I saved the PPTX as a PDF with the Enable
Accessibility and Reflow with tagged Adobe PDF box unchecked. Below, I
provide excerpts (in the form of screenshots) of the Adobe accessibility
checker reports from when the box was unchecked and then from when the
box was checked. It seems unchecking the box does not resolve the
problem."



They then got this reply:



"The accessibility report in PDF is reading the textboxes that was
created in the PPTX format as figures. It is still good to check what
the reasoning is for PDF to be flagging these figures, but with a deeper
analysis after the reports, it is clear that alt text was maintained and
this was a false positive flag.

As you said, doing a review of the errors from the accessibility report
via text to speech to go through the flagged material may be beneficial
to see if there is something going on with these error flags. Some will
be an actual error where you will work on correcting and some will be
false errors."



And then they reached out to me to see if there was any way to resolve
this at the source. I'm not a PDF specialist, so I'm turning to the
community to see if there are any ideas about this. Please note the prof
is already using the Accessibility Checker in PPTx and have the
rudimentary knowledge to make their PPTx accessible using the MS
accessibility checker. I apologize if this email is a bit confusing or
if this is off-topic, but this is basically the only info I have. I
would appreciate feedback on this issue.

Thanks,
Catherine