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Thread: Acrobat 6.0 Accessibility issues
Number of posts in this thread: 4 (In chronological order)
From: chris dobson
Date: Thu, Dec 15 2005 5:00PM
Subject: Acrobat 6.0 Accessibility issues
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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
Voice:
From: Webb, KerryA
Date: Thu, Dec 15 2005 5:40PM
Subject: RE: Acrobat 6.0 Accessibility issues
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Chris wrote:
>
> 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.
>
. . .
> 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.
I received a pre-release copy of Acrobat 6.0 last year and found the same problems.
I reported them to the local Adobe rep, who checked back with the developers and said that they had not previously been aware of the issues.
We weren't too impressed with their Accessibility credentials.
Kerry
--
Kerry Webb
IT Policy & Planning
InTACT
x70239
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From: sean keegan
Date: Mon, Dec 19 2005 11:40AM
Subject: RE: Acrobat 6.0 Accessibility issues
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Hi Chris,
Just a quick comment - I do not work for Adobe, but have some experience
with the creation process behind accessible PDFs.
> 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.
To create a tagged-PDF, you need to make sure that Adobe Acrobat has
installed into the MS Office suite. One quick way of checking this is to
open MS Word, and look to see if the menu bar selections "Adobe PDF" and
"Acrobat Comments" are visible to the right of the "Help" menu bar option.
I have had some issues with using the Adobe icon, so my suggestion is to
choose "Adobe PDF" from the menu bar and select "Convert to Adobe PDF".
> .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
If you add a text description to an image in MS Word (using the "Format
Picture" process), then you need to create the PDF from MS Word using the
above procedure I described. You will not be able to use the File > Print >
Adobe PDF method and create the tags later in Acrobat and still have the
text description present.
>.and several of the styles (for example: heading 1, heading 2) do not
convert to their respective tags (H1, H2, etc.).
The heading information is being pulled from the Styles and Formatting
information in MS Word. In other words, in the tagged-PDF in Acrobat it
will say "Heading 1" because in MS Word that is how the style is defined.
If you change the style in MS Word to H1, then that is what will get
generated when you create a tagged-PDF. The Styles and Formatting in MS
Word
> 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).
Unfortunately, I cannot comment on this feature in Acrobat 6. I have used
this in Acrobat 7 and as long as you select the option to create PDF tags,
then it creates the tags based on the HTML structure. This is a checkbox
under "Settings" when you choose to "Create PDF from Web Page". The catch
is that if the HTML structure is all wacked (my technical term), then the
PDF tags will not make much sense.
I put together a training manual for our system on how to create accessible
PDF documents with Adobe Acrobat 6 (at:
http://www.htctu.net/trainings/manuals/web/Creating_Accessible_PDFs2.pdf).
It is under a Creative Commons License, but you are welcome to take a look
at it. Drop me a line if you have any questions about it. I realize that
you are limited to Acrobat 6, but if you have the chance to upgrade, Acrobat
7 does offer improvements in accessible PDF creation.
Can you do visually rich graphical/magazine-type layouts in MS Word that get
easily converted to tagged-PDFs? In my opinion, not really. It works best
for more simple design layouts that may be 1-3 columns with basic data
tables and images. If you want to go for the visually complex style layouts
and maintain the tagged-PDF output, I would suggest you check out InDesign
(a mid to high end layout and design tool).
All this being said, I do remember there was a patch that was important when
using Acrobat 6 with Word XP (it was also included in an update to Acrobat
6). I tried looking at the Adobe site for this, but could not find it. My
suggestion would be to start Acrobat 6 and then apply any updates that are
available for version 6 as this may help.
Hope this helps.
Take care,
sean
Sean Keegan
Web Accessibility Instructor
High Tech Center Training Unit for the
California Community Colleges
Cupertino, CA
408.996.6044
From: Andrew Kirkpatrick
Date: Thu, Dec 22 2005 9:40AM
Subject: RE: Acrobat 6.0 Accessibility issues
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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.