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Re: Tools for PDF Remediation

for

From: Joshua Hori
Date: Nov 1, 2024 12:45PM

I’m struggling with Acrobat Pro on Mac, particularly when it comes to tables. Unless it’s automated, the table editor doesn’t work. I can mark column and row headers, but manipulating table recognition is another story.

Allyant and PREP have the best math options. Crawford, CodeMantra, and Equidox add alt text of equations to equation images, which may be difficult to follow along and memorize. Axes4 doesn’t even have a roadmap for math content but is a windows only software. All others are web based PDF editors, where it really helps to have a lot of RAM on your computer to prevent crashes. The larger files can be worrisome.

Glad I waited on purchasing, the PDF to markdown conversions are proving to be promising: https://www.datalab.to/

Best,

Joshua Hori
Accessible Technology Coordinator
Information Educational Technology
Academic Technology Services
50 Hutchison Dr.
Davis, CA 95616
530-752-2439
Schedule a meeting via Calendly<https://calendly.com/d/ytt-hsj-vbn>




From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > on behalf of L Snider < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Date: Friday, November 1, 2024 at 5:47 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Tools for PDF Remediation
Sadly Acrobat still rules with the most it can remidiate . It has not
changed significantly in eons. I still don't get why. Microsoft changed and
evolved, are they perfect? Nope. However, it became a part of their
culture.

The only good thing is that we have tools to help, like commonlook, axes4,
etc.

Search the archives of this list for posts from Karen McCall, who has
posted more recent findings about other programs and this topic.

Cheers

Lisa

On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 5:08 PM Vaibhav Saraf < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> Hello people,
>
> I was doing some research on various PDF remediation tools used and ran
> into this 7-year old discussion on this very same list:
> https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=8432
>
> I agree with many points raised here, such as remediating PDFs over and
> over is not a solution, we should have more trainings and accessible
> templates to start with. At my previous client we also went to the extent
> of minimize producing new PDFs and converting many rusty old ones to
> accessible webpages instead of remediating them.
>
> Also the concerns raised about Adobe Acrobat's user experience are very
> relatable, and as a screen reader user, last thing I want to do is
> remediating PDFs. These days I even find browsers do somewhat better job at
> rendering PDFs, though they fail miserably reading lists and tables.
>
> I am curious though, since this discussion is now 7 years old, are the
> different tools discussed have more or less the same effectiveness or
> utility or some upped or downed itself anyone's pecking order? Curious to
> know what comes out.
>
> Cheers,
> Vaibhav
> > > > >