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Re: PDF accessibility and compatibility with Browsers

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From: Steve Green
Date: Feb 11, 2023 9:37AM

Laura is correct. Opening PDFs in a browser is a complete lottery and we advise against it.

Chrome and Edge are terrible because they ignore all the tagging. They use heuristics to decide what the headings are, presumably based on font size, and they make all headings level 2 regardless of what the author specified. They also ignore other semantic structure such as lists, which makes it more difficult to navigate within documents and understand them.

Firefox does use all the tagging and gives the best user experience of any PDF reader I have tested other than Adobe Reader, which is the best by far.

macOS opens PDFs in Preview by default. I can't recall much about it other than it didn't properly support the JavaScript a client had put in a fillable form. Worse still, Preview wrecked the document such that if you saved it you couldn't then open it and fill in the form in Adobe Reader or anything else.

I have not tried reading PDFs with Voiceover and Safari.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Laura Roberts
Sent: 11 February 2023 12:33
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] PDF accessibility and compatibility with Browsers

The browser PDF plugins that open a pdf inside the browser aren't so great.
However, the end user can change their computer settings to open all PDFs with Adobe Reader or Acrobat instead of inside the browser. Or they can choose to download the PDF and then open it with Reader.
You could also code your site to open the pdf as an attachment rather than in the browser or a new window.
Here's an article on how to do that (I've not tried this myself):
https://stuvel.eu/articles/pdfdownload/

On Sat, Feb 11, 2023, 2:19 AM Dhananjay Bhole < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Can i know how to remediate PDF accessibility challenges with browsers.
> I have remediated a PDF file with Adobe full check and PAC3. It is
> fully accessible when i open it through Adobe acrobat. But when i
> tested it in safari in MAC environment, It was not rendering
> properly, reading order was disterbed.
> Can i get any clue how should i address this problem?
>
> Regards
> --
> Dhananjay Bhole,
> Accessibility evangelist,
> Cell: +919850123212
> Website: http://www.sites.google.com/site/dhananjaybhole
> > > archives at http://webaim.org/discussion/archives
> >