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Acrobat 6.0 Accessibility issues

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From: chris dobson
Date: Dec 15, 2005 5:00PM

To any who may have insight,
I am responsible for teaching faculty, at a community college, the
process of creating accessible PDF documents. I have been trying for
some time to document out a process of converting a Word (XP) document
file to accessible PDF; and I continue to be frustrated with the
results of this procedure or process.

For example, the process of conversion from Word via the Acrobat icon,
or File > Print > Adobe PDF, which uses the producer: Acrobat Distiller
6.0.1; or the process within Acrobat Professional 6.0 File > Create PDF
> From file... never seems to work appropriately. For some reason,
when I add tags to the Acrobat 6.0 PDF document, the alternate text
inside Word's 'Format Picture' window never comes across with the
conversion, and several of the styles (for example: heading 1, heading
2) do not convert to their respective tags (H1, H2, etc.). Is this
normal or to be expected?

The same thing happens when I attempt to create a PDF from inside
Acrobat using File > Create PDF > From Web Page... (Acrobat Web Capture
6.0). I have tried to follow the documentation from both Acrobat, and
WebAim.org's technique pages, and cannot seem to figure this out
besides duplicating the process of adding Alt text, and changing tag
properties and order.

Unfortunately I am left to working with Acrobat 6.0, since I have
limited support from my own IT department. Has anyone had similar
experiences attempting to create accessible PDF documents in Acrobat
6.0? Any suggestions as to what I may try? Any help would be
appreciated.

Chris
--------
Christopher Dobson
Curriculum Content Graphic Illustrator
Department of Instructional Technology
Harper College
1200 West Algonquin Road
Palatine, Illinois 60067
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