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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