Comments on: Accessible PDF – Revisited

By: Livio

Livio — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 15:28:54 +0000

Sure, but without semantics a file is accessible? This method produce a “technical accessibility”, verified with Adobe rules, is all.
The same result with Indesign, all paragraph styles go very well in PDF structure. But for screen readers file a PDF like this is same a txt. Txt is accessible? Uhm, for me not.
I have some writings on this problem in my little blog, http://www.biroblu.info, but only in italian, my english is very poor sorry .
I am working on a big project also for an italian publisher, for producing accessible electronic books. I have some material in a test site for now, test.biroblu.info/uno, for an accessible flow with Indesign and Acrobat.

By: jeb

jeb — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 15:01:26 +0000

Thank you Deborah for your thoughtful comments and compliments.

Perhaps I should have been more clear in the background on my choice – and recommendation – of the Office Ad-in as opposed to Acrobat’s PDFmaker. Truth is, I am still running with version 8 of Acrobat Professional. I’ll have to get a few more contracts and build a few more websites before I can afford to upgrade…

That said, the PDFmaker plugin for ver 8 worked fine with MS Office 2003, but crashed and burned with MS Office 2007 when I upgraded to the new Office. I’ve read the suggestions on making PDFmaker work with Office 2007, but found nothing worked for me. So I switched over the the MS plug-in which so far seems to be running fine.

My understanding from the Acrobatusers webinar was that the PDF maker plugin v.9 was more robust (than v.8) and would apparently check for accessibility problems within the conversion process and fix them then. The MS plug-in does not do this testing, so I test the document after the conversion has been made. I guess it doesn’t really matter when you do it, the important part is that you do test the document before distributing it to the public.

Thanks again for your contribution to this conversation.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:59:44 +0000

Anyone use OxygenOffice or OpenOffice? These office packages convert to pdf well enough, from what I can tell. There is also Scribus…Not sure about accessibility issues yet.

By: jeb

jeb — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 14:50:50 +0000

Thank you for your comment. I will admit that I did not test these documents with JAWS. But I can report that when I reviewed the tags in documents made this way, they did show the Headings made in Word did convert to Headings (in the same hierarchical order) in Acrobat. Whether JAWS can accurately read these or now, it a different issue.

Perhaps I did not put enough of a point on it, but my clear intention was to motivate people to test their documents before making them public. As I am not a JAWS user, it is easy for me to test with this application and I rely on the accessibility checker built into Acrobat Professional. I guess if you are suggesting that the results of that test are incorrect, then Adobe needs to be made aware of this and fix it.

Thank you again for you contribution to this conversation.

By: Joe Clark

Joe Clark — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 13:06:51 +0000

You’re using “attenuate” incorrectly.

PDF/UA extensively considered the problem of spacer GIFs and other meaningless graphics in the Web context and determined they almost never come up in the PDF context. If they do, tag them as artifacts.

G.F. Mueden, tagged PDFs can be reflowed into a single column at will.

By: G F Mueden

G F Mueden — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 22:00:37 +0000

Oh dear. None of the things mentioned speak to why I hate pdf files. I need to cut the columns short and enlarge them to about half screen width. never been able to do it with pdf files but I can do it with HTML. The other reason is that that i can’t convert a three or two column format to a single column and scroll down without the see-saw down-up-and over-and down again needed to read a multicolumned report. Pdf is great foe hard print, but for the web, give me HTML any day.
BTW, why can’t the font in this text entry box be as legible as the rest of the page? gf mueden@verizon.net ===gm===

By: Livio

Livio — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:51:37 +0000

Not true that a PDF originated from Word is automatically accessible, also with tag and in presence of a optimal Word document. If you try to read this PDF with Jaws, pression of Insert+F6 (for intercept headers) do nothing… Jaws speak no headings in this page. Is necessary work on role map of tag structure.

By: Dona

Dona — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 14:33:54 +0000

Thanks for this article. The section on headings is very interesting. Just yesterday I tried to explain to some colleagues why headings are important when insuring accessibility.

I agree with William about the availability of articles about PDF accessibility.

I use the Office Add-in to convert files to PDF, but I always heavily tweak the tags.

Have you had a chance to test either PAW or CommonLook from NetCentric? I have and found it to be easier to deal with tags myself than use those products, however I understand that folks in my company feel otherwise.

By: Deborah

Deborah — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:35:04 +0000

The Adobe Acrobat webinars are great learning experiences. I attended the webinar last month, and picked up some new info on accessible PDFs. I only wish the webinar had gone into more detail on complex tables.

At the college I work at, we are slowly moving forward in re-publishing more accessible and usable PDFs.

I’m curious about your comment that the “Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF” does a better job of converting documents than the Acrobat PDFmaker plugin; can you provide more specific details?

The Maine CITE page is a great compilation of information for creating accessible documents. I had not seen it before, and have bookmarked the page. If I might offer another resource, check out the the December 2008 post I wrote, “Ten Tips for Creating Usable and Accessible PDFs” at http://refresh-detroit.org/2008/12/02/ten-tips-for-creating-usable-and-accessible-pdfs/

By: William Lawrence

William Lawrence — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 13:34:26 +0000

It ought to be noted that the really only truly accessible means to convert a Microsoft Word Document to a truly accessible PDF is with Microsoft Word & PDFMaker on a PC. On any other platforms with other applications, the accessibility has to be built into the PDF ex post facto. I could be wrong, and if so, let me know.

By the way, thanks for writing about PDF accessibility. Up until this year, most of what one could find has been folk lore like materials.