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RE: Acrobat 6.0 Accessibility issues

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From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Dec 22, 2005 9:40AM

Chris,
What version of MS-Word are you using? (the answer is Word 2000 or newer
for tagged PDF creation to work).

It sounds like you are adding the tags yourself in Acrobat. If all is
working correctly, the tags should already be in the PDF document at the
time it is created in Word. You should use the "adobe PDF" menu to
create the PDF document - this method uses the MakeAccessible Plugin
that is installed in Word. If you don't use this method, the alts and
structure won't come through, and adding tags in Acrobat on the PDF
created from the print menu will not result in the same tag structures.

Can you try this again from the Adobe PDF menu?

Thanks,
AWK



Andrew Kirkpatrick
Accessibility Engineer
Adobe Systems


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.
6.0? Any suggestions as to what I may try? Any help would be
appreciated.