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Re: - Word Documents header and footer areas not exported to PDF tag tree

for

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Dec 12, 2024 9:58AM

As Doug explains, this is by design.

Content that is significant to a document's intended meaning should not
be included *only* in headers and footers, which are considered
supplementary and repetitive information.

In addition to the reasons Doug explains, including such content in the
regular page stream may also interrupt the flow of text for some
assistive technology, by inserting the footer or header in between a
single paragraph or list that is intended to flow from one page to the
next.

A document's title, date, and other common information placed in
headers/footers should appear elsewhere in the document as standard text
that won't be artifacted when converted to PDF.

If there is significant content in a header or footer, that you want to
include once and only once, then one strategy in Word is to start the
repeated header/footer on the second and then on the first page insert a
duplicate of the header/footer that is not actually placed in the header
or footer area, but is instead manually positioned to appear in the
exact same location. You can manually place such content by modifying
the top/bottom margins for the first page, or by using a text box and
applying absolute positioning. In the latter case, you would want to
"anchor" the text box in the place where you want the content to be read
by assistive technology.

Phil.

Philip Kiff
D4K Communications

On 2024-12-12 11:41 a.m., Hayman, Douglass wrote:
> Jon,
>
> From what I've seen/heard, we tend to exclude those in our PDFs when remediating them. We might select just the first instance of something in the header if it provides something meaningful but otherwise missing. But we'd spare the user hearing
>
> "Acme Corporation logo" read as each new page loads while maybe the first one was ok to have. Subsequent announcement of that header content would be a distraction.
>
> Likewise, as I understand the process, we'd exclude the footer info and instead rely upon say, the page numbers of the PDF itself. I've seen PDFs that were a compilation of documents in the case of a public records request. The first document might be numbered 1-5 in the footer, the second one 1-20 and if those were not artificated but announced the user of assistive technology might hear in sequence, "page 4, page 5, page 1, page 2 and it went from the one to the other document now combined in a PDF.
>
>
>
> Doug Hayman
> IT Accessibility Coordinator
> Information Technology
> Olympic College
> <EMAIL REMOVED>
> (360) 475-7632
>
>
>