WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: PDF U/A alternate description for links

for

From: Christine Hogenkamp
Date: Feb 15, 2023 2:38PM

Hi Elizabeth,

For whatever it's worth, when making accessible PDFs in InDesign, my team
noticed that our TOC links were announced as "Blank" using NVDA unless the
Alt text box was filled in the Hyperlinks panel in InDesign. We can perhaps
assume that other document software might be accidentally making similar
errors when exporting to PDF, so the alt text box may exist and be required
by PAC and/or PDF/UA as a way to ensure the text is "seen" by screen
reader, as a fallback?

I have definitely struggled to understand the relationship between
Link-OBJR and annotations, it may be there are some document programs that
use annotations to create links in a way that may not be compatible with
screen reader software, or maybe does so imperfectly, either due to
software code or user error in formatting the document.

One day I'd love for Adobe to take proper responsibility for the PDF file
format in relation to accessible PDFs and update their software to explain
these elements more clearly or at least put in more dedicated
panels/wizards to help prevent user error. Oh well, I can always dream ha
ha!

*x*
*Christine Hogenkamp (She, Her)*
Front-end Developer
ContextCreative.com <http://contextcreative.com/>;

>
>