🚀 go-pugleaf

On Friday, August 27, 2004 12:04:41 AM UTC+2, (unknown) wrote:
> Hey there,
> 
> Just a heads-up to anybody looking for big bushels of money: I've had lots of problems getting old PDFs to be accessible. Some of the problems:
> 
> 1. The file was generated from an EPS file, so there's no text layer in it for a screen reader to, well, read.
> 
> 2. The file was generated from Quark XPress, so when I add tags in Acrobat the layer attributes in the PDF change and suddenly that photograph that was in the background is overprinting the text.
> 
> 3. Pagemaker files also have problems, but not as many as Quark.
> 
> 4. InDesign files are generally pretty good but can still be quirky (working through this problem so can't be much more specific).
> 
> 5. If I generate a tag structure in a PDF, there's no guarantee that it will capture the text blocks in a sensible way. The reading order may be incomprehensible, even if I use Preferences>Reading to change the reading order.
> 
> 6. Adding ALT text in the tag structure, as Adobe's documentation instructs me to do for accessibility and to pass their Accessibility Checker, does NOT add that text into the text that is read by Acrobat's built-in text reader (View>Read Out Loud). That ALT text also does not appear in any text file that is saved out of a PDF.
> 
> 7. I HAVE found that if I save a text file out of Acrobat that this is what Acrobat's reader actually reads out loud. This appears to match up with the information that actually appears on the Contents tab.
> 
> I'll be looking at TN5409 (Portable Document Format: Changes from 1.3 to 1.4) for answers.... but the real answer? I think it's the free market--you folks. Post to this thread if you want to continue the conversation, or (fingers crossed) tell me about tools that may make this better. :)