Advanced Accessible PDFs

Learn to address issues that are preventing your PDF documents from being fully accessible and compliant and get tips and tricks to streamline the PDF remediation process.

Introduction

• Is your document accessible?
• What you should know

1. Advanced Accessibility Topics in Adobe Acrobat

• Shortcuts for walking the tags tree
• Creating a tag from a selection
• Paragraphs that split across a page
• Creating hyperlinks
• Fixing untagged hyperlinks
• Addressing multiline hyperlinks
• Advanced techniques using the Content pane
• Security and accessibility
• Merging and splitting documents
• Tagging challenging elements
• Using Autotag
• Fixing decorative bullets and numbers
• Reading options in Acrobat
• Detriments of editing a PDF file
• Working with ligatures and drop caps

2. Working with Tables in Adobe Acrobat

• Defining header cells in a table
• Tables that span multiple pages
• Understanding table spans
• Tagging tables with merged cells
• Defining scope and span manually
• Dealing with blank cells
• What makes a bad table?
• Creative table solutions
• Creating heading and data associations
• An alternative solution to header associations
• Linearizing tables

3. Working with Forms in Adobe Acrobat

• Adding form fields in Adobe Acrobat
• Adding a tooltip to form fields
• Manually tagging form fields
• Automatically tagging form fields
• Tagging a button
• Structuring form tags in the Tags panel

4. Advanced Accessibility Topics in Microsoft Word

• Saving accessible PDFs from Microsoft Word
• Working with merged cells
• Working with custom styles
• Working with multiple table header rows
• Working with multilevel lists
• Setting hyperlink tooltips

5. Advanced Accessibility Topics in Adobe InDesign

• Working with merged table cells
• Working with table headers
• Getting creative with bullets and numbers
• Adding alt text for hyperlinks
• Adding form fields in InDesign
• Adding form fields in tables
• Defining tab order for form fields in InDesign
• Working with InDesign-drawn objects
• Text effects and accessibility
• Helpful scripts for accessibility
• The MadeToTag plugin

6. PDF/UA Remediation

• Understanding PDF/UA
• Reviewing the PAC 2021 Checker
• The Preflight panel
• Artifacting nonstructural elements
• Fixing element used as a root element error
• Fixing inappropriate use of an element error
• Role mapping issues
• Fixing alternative descriptions for annotations error
• Adding IDs for note elements
• Fixing a figure element with no bounding box error
• Embedding fonts
• Fixing table header cell has no associated subcells error
• Adding the PDF/UA entry
• Why is PDF/UA not verified?
• PDF/UA resources

7. Third-Party Tools

• Tools for visualizing document structure
• axesWord
• axesPDF

Conclusion

• Next steps for accessibility