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Number of posts in this thread: 6 (In chronological order)

From: Laurie Kamrowski-Lamb
Date: Wed, Feb 20 2019 11:28AM
Subject: Making older PDFs accessible
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Hi all!

I'm new to the forum, and I work for a small community college and have
been tasked with updating all previous PDFs created by the school for
accessibility. I am working with the table editor in Adobe Acrobat DC Pro
Continuous Release, on a Windows 10 machine. I am using
NVDA to check everything.

The majority of the project is that:

1) I can only work with Metadata
2) I cannot alter or change anything because these particular PDFs are the
official meeting minutes of the board of directors

The biggest problem that I am encountering are multi-level deep complex
tables (I have an example image if anyone wants to look but wasn't sure
about attaching it directly to the list serv) that are financial in nature.
In addition to other things such as power point and 'Statements of
revenues and expenses', etc..

So here are my questions:

1) How reliable is the accessibility check in Adobe Acrobat? I have been
having multiple crashes a day when I work with the larger tables.

2) Is there a way to manually encode the tables metadata? I am having
multiple issues where, for an unknown reason, the tables are either
skipping lines or occupying two or three rows, with no rhyme or reason. Is
there a different program to be able to encode these tables or is there a
way to manually encode these?

Any and all input or advice is more than welcome and appreciated,

Laurie

From: glen walker
Date: Wed, Feb 20 2019 11:59AM
Subject: Re: Making older PDFs accessible
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Sounds like you might be having trouble with colspan or rowspan if it's
skipping rows. Adobe is in the middle of a 6-part webinar series talking
about PDF remediation. Last week they talked about tables so it might be
worth watching:

https://youtu.be/kcM_jyHGd6Y?t=339
(the url skips the first 5-ish minutes but you can move the seek bar to the
beginning if you want)

Glen

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Wed, Feb 20 2019 12:40PM
Subject: Re: Making older PDFs accessible
← Previous message | Next message →

Hi Laurie,

Welcome to the WebAIM mailing list!

As Glen suggest, if a table is causing your table editor to crash, the
problem is usually related to incorrect row or column "span" settings on
one or more cells. PDF files that have been generated by (especially old
versions of) Microsoft Office sometimes have all kinds of extra cells or
rows or columns with incorrect span settings.

You can sometimes get a table back into an editable state by changing
all the span attributes (both row span and column span) on all TH's to
TD's for all cells in a table to 1. But this can be tricky to do in
Acrobat unless you can actually open the table in the table editor.

You can manually edit a span by editing the properties of the TH or TD
tag, but I don't have a good online explanation of how to do that:
- Right-click on a tag to pull up the Properties dialog (shortcut P), then
- Select Edit Tag (shortcut Alt-E), then
- Find the right Tag Element to change (!)

Also, Glen, I didn't know about these webinars, thanks for highlighting
them!

Phil.

Philip Kiff
D4K Communications

On 2019-02-20 1:59 PM, glen walker wrote:
> Sounds like you might be having trouble with colspan or rowspan if it's
> skipping rows. Adobe is in the middle of a 6-part webinar series talking
> about PDF remediation. Last week they talked about tables so it might be
> worth watching:
>
> https://youtu.be/kcM_jyHGd6Y?t=339
> (the url skips the first 5-ish minutes but you can move the seek bar to the
> beginning if you want)
>
> Glen
> > > >

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Wed, Feb 20 2019 1:04PM
Subject: Re: Making older PDFs accessible
← Previous message | Next message →

On 2019-02-20 1:28 PM, Laurie Kamrowski-Lamb wrote:
> 1) How reliable is the accessibility check in Adobe Acrobat? I have been
> having multiple crashes a day when I work with the larger tables.

The built-in Accessibility checker is a rough tool for doing a quick
check on the accessibility of a PDF. There are many things that cannot
be checked by any automated accessibility checker. And there are some
accessibility features that the automated Acrobat checker does not
evaluate.

I used to get crashes in Acrobat Pro DC more often than I do now. I find
the current release in the "Continuous Release" program to be very stable.

The most important thing for Acrobat's checker and table editor to work
is that the calculated number of cells in each row match what it
expects. If you have a TD spanning two rows, then the number of TD's in
that row must be one less than in a row which does not contain a span.
Same with columns. I have found that if you tag a complex table
perfectly, then the table editor can always open it without crashing,
and the Accessibility checker will always pass it without errors.

Note that the Acrobat table editor is not capable of managing tables
that span multiple pages. I think it should open them without crashing,
but you probably will not be able to edit anything beyond the first page
without corrupting the table.

Phil.

Philip Kiff
D4K Communications

From: Donna Anspach
Date: Thu, Feb 21 2019 8:32AM
Subject: Re: Making older PDFs accessible
← Previous message | Next message →

Hi Laurie,

Adobe just did an accessibility webinar on tables. You can access it here:

https://adobe.ly/2TJUMcb

Look for Advanced PDF Accessibility Complex Tables. There are other
sessions that may be helpful to you as well.

Hope this helps.
Donna

On Wed, Feb 20, 2019 at 11:28 AM Laurie Kamrowski-Lamb < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
wrote:

> Hi all!
>
> I'm new to the forum, and I work for a small community college and have
> been tasked with updating all previous PDFs created by the school for
> accessibility. I am working with the table editor in Adobe Acrobat DC Pro
> Continuous Release, on a Windows 10 machine. I am using
> NVDA to check everything.
>
> The majority of the project is that:
>
> 1) I can only work with Metadata
> 2) I cannot alter or change anything because these particular PDFs are the
> official meeting minutes of the board of directors
>
> The biggest problem that I am encountering are multi-level deep complex
> tables (I have an example image if anyone wants to look but wasn't sure
> about attaching it directly to the list serv) that are financial in nature.
> In addition to other things such as power point and 'Statements of
> revenues and expenses', etc..
>
> So here are my questions:
>
> 1) How reliable is the accessibility check in Adobe Acrobat? I have been
> having multiple crashes a day when I work with the larger tables.
>
> 2) Is there a way to manually encode the tables metadata? I am having
> multiple issues where, for an unknown reason, the tables are either
> skipping lines or occupying two or three rows, with no rhyme or reason. Is
> there a different program to be able to encode these tables or is there a
> way to manually encode these?
>
> Any and all input or advice is more than welcome and appreciated,
>
> Laurie
> > > > >
--
Donna Anspach
ATFL, LLC
(970) 227-5308

From: Elizabeth Thomas
Date: Thu, Feb 21 2019 12:49PM
Subject: Re: WebAIM-Forum Digest, Vol 167, Issue 17- making older PDFs accessible
← Previous message | No next message

Just wanted to comment that even though Adobe's webinar on remediating complex tables is great, don't be discouraged if remediating your table is not as easy as the webinar makes it seem. He made it look much easier than it normally is (especially in regards to the multi- page tables).


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> 1. Re: Making older PDFs accessible (Philip Kiff)
> 2. Re: Making older PDFs accessible (Philip Kiff)
> 3. Android larg text on Chrome web view (Ajay Sharma)
> 4. Re: Android larg text on Chrome web view (Jonathan Avila)
> 5. Re: Making older PDFs accessible (Donna Anspach)
> 6. NVDA - aria-live=polite not announced (Tomlins Diane)
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