[Athen] Comparing Results of Tagged PDF with Acrobat and Alternatives

[chagnon at pubcom.com]

We, too, have noticed the mis-tagging of TOCs and other elements for the
past year, and it's getting worse with each new release or update from
Microsoft and Adobe. 

 

(FYI, I can't address FoxIt or PowerPDF because they've never been able to
make a correctly tagged PDF from MS Office, so what they produce now is no
better or worse than what they did in the past.)

 

TOCs that are constructed correctly in MS Office export as a jumble of tags
that are inaccessible for those using A T, especially screen readers. 

 

Up until about a year ago, both Microsoft and Adobe had created a reliable
method of making an accessible, tagged TOC in PDFs...and now suddenly they
no longer do that.

 

Why has this happened?

 

Since those of us who make and test accessible documents haven't changed our
methods, the problem must come from something that Microsoft and Adobe have
done to the software tools:

 

Could be that ...

1.	MS Word has changed how it encodes TOCs in Word documents.
2.	Microsoft's Save As PDF utility has changed how it tags the TOC.
3.	Adobe's PDF Maker export utility (aka the Acrobat Ribbon) has
changed how it tags the TOC.

 

I actually don't know who changed what at this time, but I do know that what
we're now getting from MS Office is a piece of junk that should not be
allowed by the industry.

 

People -- real human beings who use A T -- can't read the TOC. It is an
inaccessible mess!

 

If you think that this will be a problem for yourself or those who will use
your documents, then I encourage you to download Karen's sample documents
and judge for yourself.

 

And then we need to do something to correct this problem.

 

--Bevi Chagnon

 

 

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Bevi Chagnon, founder/CEO  |   <mailto:Bevi at PubCom.com> Bevi at PubCom.com 

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PubCom: Technologists for Accessible Design + Publishing

consulting . training . development . design . sec. 508 services

Upcoming classes at  <http://www.pubcom.com/classes> www.PubCom.com/classes 

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From: athen-list <athen-list-bounces at mailman12.u.washington.edu> On Behalf
Of Karlen Communications
Sent: Thursday, June 13, 2019 8:56 AM
To: 'WebAIM Discussion List' <webaim-forum at list.webaim.org>
Cc: 'Access Technology Higher Education Network'
<athen-list at u.washington.edu>
Subject: [Athen] Comparing Results of Tagged PDF with Acrobat and
Alternatives

 

Hi Everyone:

 

I've started a series of comparison articles on the accessibility/tagging of
PDF documents from Acrobat Pro DC, Foxit Phantom for Business and Nuance
PowerPDF Advanced. Note that both Foxit and Nuance have versions of their
software that don't have tagging capabilities. The ones listed do.

 

https://www.karlencommunications.com/DocumentRemediation.htm

 

I plan to take different elements, for example am now looking at how
footnotes/endnotes are tagged by each of them, and putting the articles on
this web page. I didn't want to create a new web page and this one seemed
the logical choice to house the content.

 

Cheers, Karen

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