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From: Farough, David (CFP/PSC)
Date: Mon, Sep 14 2020 9:37AM
Subject: Accessible bi-lingual forms using Adobe live-cycle designer is this possible?
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Good morning everyone;

Currently, we provide both English and French versions of our PDF forms. These are designed using Adobe LiveCycle designer.
One of our clients is requesting that we provide a bi-lingual version of a form due to the fact that it will need to be referenced by several people who will need to approve the form and provide the necessary signatures.
I am not sure if this is possible.

My preference would be to provide the user the ability to select the language using a button or link on the form. I know that dynamic forms are not accessible so I am wondering if this can be done without creating a dynamic form. Given that the same form may be accessed by several people who may use either English or French when providing signatures to facilitate the approval process. I am wondering if this is even possible.

Thanks as always for any suggestions.
David Farough
Application Accessibility Co-ordinator,
Corporate IT Management
Public Service Commission of Canada/ Government of Canada
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From: Joe Humbert (A11y)
Date: Mon, Sep 14 2020 8:39PM
Subject: Re: Accessible bi-lingual forms using Adobe live-cycle designer is this possible?
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Hi David,

I'm not sure how this could be done in LiveCycle Designer, but individual
tags can be associated with different languages similar to the lang
attribute in HTML. So similar to HTML you can set the primary language for
the document and then set individual PDF tags have the correct language
(French). The screen reader will automatically switch languages if it
supports both

Either you could just include multiple versions of the form in the different
languages one after the other (Like a product manual that has multiple
languages).

Or you could include the English on the top and the French translation for
each piece of text underneath it (or vice versa) to not double the number of
pages.

Thankx,
Joe Humbert
Accessibility Champion
Android & iOS Accessibility Novice

From: Farough, David (CFP/PSC)
Date: Tue, Sep 15 2020 8:01AM
Subject: Re: Accessible bi-lingual forms using Adobe live-cycle designer is this possible?
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Hi Joe;
Thanks for your response.

What I am not sure about, is whether or not you can specify a different language in the middle of a form label.
Also coding a form in this way would make the form very verbose and provide a unsatisfactory user experience for both linguistic populations.

These forms are tipically distributed to various people in the organization for approval. Needless to say some parts of the form will become read only after the user has submitted the form for approval at the next level.
In these cases being able to specify the other language could get complicated. Also when signing such a form, is it reasonable to expect someone to sign the form if they don't understand what they are signing?

I don't know that there is a solution that would work well for everybody.
I just thought I would check here in case I had missed something.

From: Moore,Michael (Accessibility) (HHSC)
Date: Tue, Sep 15 2020 8:08AM
Subject: Re: Accessible bi-lingual forms using Adobe live-cycle designer is this possible?
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To answer the question about whether PDF or LiveCycle (XFA) forms allow you to provide two language tags for the label the short answer is no. In PDF forms the accessible name is bound as the title property for the form field object itself. The form field object has a language property but you can only choose one. In XFA forms it is possible to point to another object to provide the accessible name more like HTML but again that object can only have a single language declaration.

Michael Moore
EIR Accessibility Manager