WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Thread: Help with a PDF with Numbered lines

for

Number of posts in this thread: 4 (In chronological order)

From: Kathryn Becker
Date: Tue, Jul 19 2011 8:00AM
Subject: Help with a PDF with Numbered lines
No previous message | Next message →

Hi,

I have a PDF where every line is numbered (like a legal document). I¹m
trying to decide how to best tag it. If I make each line a paragraph, the
number is read with that content, but it isn¹t really set off. If I mark
each of those line numbers as a lower level heading, then they would be set
off, but they are still read in the midst of sentences, and I would think
that would be distracting, too. If I artifact the numbers, that does no one
any good when something is referred to as ³in line 425 we mention².

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance--
Kathryn

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Tue, Jul 19 2011 8:33AM
Subject: Re: Help with a PDF with Numbered lines
← Previous message | Next message →

19.07.2011 17:01, Kathryn Becker wrote:

> I have a PDF where every line is numbered (like a legal document). I¹m
> trying to decide how to best tag it.

Do you mean tagging it in PDF format (which I know very little about) or
as converted to another format, such as HTML or Word? This affects the
features that might be used.

> If I make each line a paragraph, the
> number is read with that content, but it isn¹t really set off. If I mark
> each of those line numbers as a lower level heading, then they would be set
> off, but they are still read in the midst of sentences, and I would think
> that would be distracting, too. If I artifact the numbers, that does no one
> any good when something is referred to as ³in line 425 we mention².

If line numbers are relevant information, as they apparently are here,
the text can most logically be described as a table, with one column
containing the numbers and the other the lines. Depending on the browser
and assistive software, this might give the user possibilities that
don't exist with other markup. I mean things like jumping to a line by
its line number (which would me marked up as a table header cell, i.e.
th element). A table format is also useful if the user wishes to simply
copy the data into Excel or comparable program. After all, there are
people who like to use Excel for everything!

In HTML format, this may imply efficiency issues, on graphic browsers,
as normally a browser needs to read an entire table before it can start
rendering it (as even the last line may affect the column widths). If
the issue is important, it can normally be fixed using CSS.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

From: Jared Smith
Date: Tue, Jul 19 2011 8:51AM
Subject: Re: Help with a PDF with Numbered lines
← Previous message | Next message →

This topic was recently discussed here -
http://webaim.org/discussion/mail_thread?thread=4581

Jared

From: Kathryn Becker
Date: Tue, Jul 19 2011 10:33AM
Subject: Re: Help with a PDF with Numbered lines
← Previous message | No next message

Yes, I was meaning tags in a PDF, and thank you, Jared, I missed that thread
when I was searching. Makes sense and using a table is the way I'll go.

Thank you--
Kathryn