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From: Vaibhav Saraf
Date: Thu, Oct 31 2024 1:11AM
Subject: Tools for PDF Remediation
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Hello people,

I was doing some research on various PDF remediation tools used and ran
into this 7-year old discussion on this very same list:
https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=8432

I agree with many points raised here, such as remediating PDFs over and
over is not a solution, we should have more trainings and accessible
templates to start with. At my previous client we also went to the extent
of minimize producing new PDFs and converting many rusty old ones to
accessible webpages instead of remediating them.

Also the concerns raised about Adobe Acrobat's user experience are very
relatable, and as a screen reader user, last thing I want to do is
remediating PDFs. These days I even find browsers do somewhat better job at
rendering PDFs, though they fail miserably reading lists and tables.

I am curious though, since this discussion is now 7 years old, are the
different tools discussed have more or less the same effectiveness or
utility or some upped or downed itself anyone's pecking order? Curious to
know what comes out.

Cheers,
Vaibhav

From: L Snider
Date: Fri, Nov 01 2024 6:47AM
Subject: Re: Tools for PDF Remediation
← Previous message | Next message →

Sadly Acrobat still rules with the most it can remidiate . It has not
changed significantly in eons. I still don't get why. Microsoft changed and
evolved, are they perfect? Nope. However, it became a part of their
culture.

The only good thing is that we have tools to help, like commonlook, axes4,
etc.

Search the archives of this list for posts from Karen McCall, who has
posted more recent findings about other programs and this topic.

Cheers

Lisa

On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 5:08 PM Vaibhav Saraf < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
wrote:

> Hello people,
>
> I was doing some research on various PDF remediation tools used and ran
> into this 7-year old discussion on this very same list:
> https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=8432
>
> I agree with many points raised here, such as remediating PDFs over and
> over is not a solution, we should have more trainings and accessible
> templates to start with. At my previous client we also went to the extent
> of minimize producing new PDFs and converting many rusty old ones to
> accessible webpages instead of remediating them.
>
> Also the concerns raised about Adobe Acrobat's user experience are very
> relatable, and as a screen reader user, last thing I want to do is
> remediating PDFs. These days I even find browsers do somewhat better job at
> rendering PDFs, though they fail miserably reading lists and tables.
>
> I am curious though, since this discussion is now 7 years old, are the
> different tools discussed have more or less the same effectiveness or
> utility or some upped or downed itself anyone's pecking order? Curious to
> know what comes out.
>
> Cheers,
> Vaibhav
> > > > >

From: Michaels, Cody
Date: Fri, Nov 01 2024 6:59AM
Subject: Re: Tools for PDF Remediation
← Previous message | Next message →

Hi Vaibhav, I can only speak to Acrobat and Equidox - as that is what my institution uses. We need to remediate a large number of documents, most of which were created prior to our institution (a private American university) made an accessible documents initiative. Since we are a library, we can't just update our templates and leave it at that.

I found very early on that Acrobat wasn't sufficient for the types of documents I was working with, most of which have very complicated lists and tables where the Acrobat user interface was poorly equipped to deal with. I investigated and found Equidox, whose software is much more user-friendly than working in the Adobe tag tree. But I can't say I'd recommend it without qualifications. Equidox tries to emphasize conversion to HTML documents instead of PDF, and their HTML export works well. The problem is that, for institutions like our own, that simply isn't an option - especially for scanned documents that are decades old.

Equidox's PDF export tool has some issues, though. The software has two ways of dealing with content - a sensitivity tool to automatically detect zones, and a drag-and-drop interface for drawing zones manually. The problem I find is that Equidox doesn't always correctly export tags based on these zones, with some content being put in inappropriate places, and some things not being correctly tagged - rows in tables, for example, don't usually come out with the row scope identified except in the HTML export. Equidox helps make it easier for us to tackle the scale of document remediation we need, but it doesn't perform perfectly - which reduces its value considerably. Acrobat will take you farther, but at a much slower (in my opinion) pace that can quickly spiral out of control if you have a large number of unique documents to process, especially scanned documents that need to undergo OCR.

In short, my institution at least is still looking for the fabled perfect tool that is both easy to use at scale, and actually achieves the goal of making documents accessible.

Cody Michaels
Library Systems Technician
Hunt Library
= EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED =
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
Florida | Arizona | Worldwide

From: Joshua Hori
Date: Fri, Nov 01 2024 12:45PM
Subject: Re: Tools for PDF Remediation
← Previous message | Next message →

I’m struggling with Acrobat Pro on Mac, particularly when it comes to tables. Unless it’s automated, the table editor doesn’t work. I can mark column and row headers, but manipulating table recognition is another story.

Allyant and PREP have the best math options. Crawford, CodeMantra, and Equidox add alt text of equations to equation images, which may be difficult to follow along and memorize. Axes4 doesn’t even have a roadmap for math content but is a windows only software. All others are web based PDF editors, where it really helps to have a lot of RAM on your computer to prevent crashes. The larger files can be worrisome.

Glad I waited on purchasing, the PDF to markdown conversions are proving to be promising: https://www.datalab.to/

Best,

Joshua Hori
Accessible Technology Coordinator
Information Educational Technology
Academic Technology Services
50 Hutchison Dr.
Davis, CA 95616
530-752-2439
Schedule a meeting via Calendly<https://calendly.com/d/ytt-hsj-vbn>




From: WebAIM-Forum < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > on behalf of L Snider < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Date: Friday, November 1, 2024 at 5:47 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Tools for PDF Remediation
Sadly Acrobat still rules with the most it can remidiate . It has not
changed significantly in eons. I still don't get why. Microsoft changed and
evolved, are they perfect? Nope. However, it became a part of their
culture.

The only good thing is that we have tools to help, like commonlook, axes4,
etc.

Search the archives of this list for posts from Karen McCall, who has
posted more recent findings about other programs and this topic.

Cheers

Lisa

On Thu, Oct 31, 2024 at 5:08 PM Vaibhav Saraf < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = >
wrote:

> Hello people,
>
> I was doing some research on various PDF remediation tools used and ran
> into this 7-year old discussion on this very same list:
> https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=8432
>
> I agree with many points raised here, such as remediating PDFs over and
> over is not a solution, we should have more trainings and accessible
> templates to start with. At my previous client we also went to the extent
> of minimize producing new PDFs and converting many rusty old ones to
> accessible webpages instead of remediating them.
>
> Also the concerns raised about Adobe Acrobat's user experience are very
> relatable, and as a screen reader user, last thing I want to do is
> remediating PDFs. These days I even find browsers do somewhat better job at
> rendering PDFs, though they fail miserably reading lists and tables.
>
> I am curious though, since this discussion is now 7 years old, are the
> different tools discussed have more or less the same effectiveness or
> utility or some upped or downed itself anyone's pecking order? Curious to
> know what comes out.
>
> Cheers,
> Vaibhav
> > > > >

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Mon, Nov 04 2024 8:15AM
Subject: Re: Tools for PDF Remediation
← Previous message | No next message

On 2024-10-31 3:11 a.m., Vaibhav Saraf wrote:
> I was doing some research on various PDF remediation tools used and ran
> into this 7-year old discussion on this very same list:
> https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=8432
> [....]
> since this discussion is now 7 years old, are the
> different tools discussed have more or less the same effectiveness or
> utility or some upped or downed itself anyone's pecking order?

Since 2017, a few new tools were released and some improvements made,
but the most popularly recommended tools are mostly the same.

As L Snider wrote:
> Sadly Acrobat still rules with the most it can remidiate .

Adobe Acrobat Still Required

Adobe Acrobat Pro continues to be a core required tool for PDF
remediation. Adobe released a new user interface for Acrobat last year,
but lots of folks doing remediation turn it off because the old
interface seems more efficient. Adobe has incorporated so-called AI
features into Acrobat and you can't get rid of the constant nagging to
try it unless you turn off the new interface. Acrobat is more stable
than it used to be (in my opinion!). The Continuous Release cycle of
Acrobat updates more frequently than it used to, and incremental
improvements and even new features actually do appear from time to time.
Though Adobe now periodically also breaks essential functionality and
sometimes releases versions with new critical bugs.

Adobe Auto Tag Much Improved

Acrobat's Auto Tag feature is significantly better than it used to be.
Adobe has also been working on an API for automated tagging (presumably
to better compete with Crawford Technologies and Equidox and others who
provide mass conversion to accessible PDF). Currently, anyone can create
an Adobe account and use the Adobe Auto-Tag API demo to autotag a PDF
for free (without even owning Acrobat Pro):
https://acrobatservices.adobe.com/dc-accessibility-playground/main.html

CommonLook and AxesPDF Still Lead

I see that I wrote quite a long post in that WebAIM thread back in 2017.
A lot of the details I provided comparing CommonLook and AxesPDF remain
true:
https://webaim.org/discussion/mail_message?id=36073

CommonLook (formerly Netcentric) is now Allyant. Most professional
remediators recommend CommonLook PDF if you are forced to choose just
one remediation tool other than Acrobat:
https://allyant.com/commonlook-accessibility-suite/cl-pdf/

Though I personally continue to use AxesPDF alongside Acrobat instead:
https://www.axes4.com/en/software-services/axespdf

For folks with a big enough budget doing dedicated PDF remediation work,
I would  recommend having both of these.

In that 2017 thread, I wrote about how offensively expensive CommonLook
was:
"This month, I was quoted a price of CAD $15,000, PER YEAR, PER LICENSE,
(that's about USD $11,800 or $10,000 Euros PER YEAR!) for commercial use
of CommonLook GA (i.e., for a license that would allow me to provide PDF
remediation services to 3rd parties). To me, that is completely insane
pricing. I would go so far as to call it offensively high."

Since, then, I've seen other price quotes that put CommonLook more in
the same ballpark as AxesPDF. So while CommonLook is still more
expensive than AxesPDF, I don't think you'll find that it is even twice
(let alone ten times) as expensive. It has occurred to me in the
intervening years that my 2017 quotation may have been an error on the
part of their sales representative. Who knows. They didn't follow up and
there's no way to check. Several years ago CommonLook actually published
their prices publicly for a period of maybe 6-12 months, so during that
time it was easy to compare costs between CommonLook and AxesPDF.
(AxesPDF has always published their software licensing prices in a clear
and open way). But Allyant now hides their prices again, so the only way
you can find out how much it costs is by asking colleagues or filling in
a form and getting them to contact you. And sales reps can randomly
offer you whatever price they think you will pay. I personally can't
stand any software licensing system that requires me to phone someone to
find out how much it will cost.

PDFix Is New

PDFix is a new remediation tool that's appeared in the last few years.
The video demos of PDFix Desktop Pro look interesting:
https://pdfix.net/products/pdfix-desktop-pro/

I've not actually tested any of their software, but it is in active
development and may be worth considering. One key differentiating
feature is that it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux - whereas CommonLook
and AxesPDF only run on Windows - though you can run them on a Mac under
Parallels or whatever.

PAC Is Improved and Becoming Default Validator

The validators are all better than they used to be. PAC (PDF
Accessibility Checker) in particular is in active development: four
updates have been released this year. It crashes less frequently and It
now tests against both PDF/UA and WCAG. This year it introduced a new
"Quality" check tab which checks against best practices, but which has
come under criticism because the tests it runs are sometimes not nuanced
enough, which leads to sometimes wrong or misleading warning flags.

I would say that PAC 2024 has become the default tool for checking PDF
accessibility (as opposed to Allyant/CommonLook's Validator or veraPDF).
It's free, easy to use, easy to install, it generates simple,
good-looking reports you can share. It is especially popular in Europe
where PDF/UA has I think taken stronger root than in North America,
where we still emphasize the use of the WCAG to evaluate PDFs - despite
the fact that WCAG is poorly suited to this task.

Generating PDF/UA from Word Processor?

This last section isn't about remediation tools, but it may interest
folks who remediate files. Before starting to create a PDF, the first
question should always be: would this be better in HTML? But if you
really can't avoid creating a PDF, then the next best thing is to create
a PDF that doesn't require any remediation at all. And the tools
available to generate accessible PDFs directly from word processing
software are definitely getting better and better. Microsoft Word and
Office 365 continue to improve, even though they still can't generate a
PDF/UA out-of-the-box. CommonLook and Axes4 both offer add-ins that
actually can help generate a PDF/UA directly from Office. LibreOffice
does a pretty good job of generating a PDF/UA all on its own. So does
LaTeX. GrackleDocs is software that integrates with Google Docs to help
create PDF/UA files directly out of Google Docs. All those tools are
getting better and better.

Phil.

D4K Communications
Toronto, Canada