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Re: Reference/Note tags

for

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Apr 17, 2025 3:00PM

Thanks for the detailed response, Duff, confirming much, and clarifying
and qualifying elsewhere. That's very helpful for folks like me who are
trying to pin down some of the finer details of the standards and their
implementations in various software and technology.

You make a good point about the difference between web pages and PDFs:

> Unlike web pages, PDF files persist....Web pages can be fixed for
> everyone by a tweak and a reload. By contrast, PDF is often
> "delivered" rather than "served", so if it’s inaccessible on-delivery
> it’s generally inaccessible for every downstream user, forever.
>
In that context, I would note that the current widespread reliance on
automated accessibility testing for PDFs tends to produce PDFs that will
pass the PAC Tool or CommonLook Validator tests, without actually fully
meeting all the PDF/UA standards. Many PDFs are adjusted to pass these
testing tools, even where the testing tools may be not quite accurate.
Eventually, then, when software and screen readers are in place that
process all these tags more fully, we will have a lot of PDFs that
didn't ever really quite pass PDF/UA, but which only much later start to
present annoying issues for users.

Though the tests are getting better all the time, too.

Oh also, a quick correction: on re-reading my post, I noticed that I'd
mistaken the name of the new footnote/endnote reference tag in PDF 2.0.
I wrote "a new RefNote tag is introduced in PDF 2.0". Not sure where I
got that name! It should be FENote instead. I haven't actually used the
new FENote tag/structure element yet, but look forward to implementing
it in PDF 2.0 compliant files, and am very hopeful it will eventually
result in footnotes and endnotes that can be easily read and navigated
by all users.

Phil.

On 2025-04-15 3:06 p.m., Duff Johnson via WebAIM-Forum wrote:
> In lists, <LbL> elements distinguish the list item’s label from the <LBody> (the content of the LI). <Lbl> was more broadly (but poorly) defined in PDF 1.x. This situation was addressed in PDF 2.0, but implementations are only now beginning to arrive.
>
> [snip]
>
> We can only hope that, over time, assets such as the PDF Association's Techniques for Accessible PDF will help to elevate common understanding.
>
> Duff.