Acrobat XI PDF Accessibility Repair Workflow

Overview

Procedures and best practices for making existing PDF documents accessible.

Table of Contents

Tag structure

<TOC>
 |
 +-- <TOCI>
 |    |
 |    +-- <Reference>
 |         |
 |         +-- <Link>
 |              |
 |              +-- Tag: Link - OBJR
 |              +-- TOC item label
 |              +-- TOC item leader
 |              +-- TOC item page number
 +-- <TOCI>
 |

The elements of each table of contents line (label, leader, page number) should be broken out into separate tags to control the document flow.

Reference

Creating Accessible PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Professional (US Dept of Veteran Affairs)

Footnotes

It's not possible in the PDF 1.7 spec to target elements with links. The best that can be done is to target a page within the document. This might change with PDF 2.0.

Tag structure

The superscript element referencing a footnote should be tagged `<Reference>.

The footnote content should be tagged <Note>.

In the tags pane, the <Note> element should follow immediately after the <Reference> tag. This is not ideal, but it's the best option considering the PDF 1.7 spec. This way the footnote has some context. Any other placement will leave it out of context relative to the <Reference> element.

<Note>` tags must have unique ids. (with the tag selected > right click > Properties (Ctrl+I) > Object Properties modal dialog > Tag tab > ID)

Reference

Thread: making footnotes accessible in PDF documents (WebAIM)

Splitting a file between multiple teams

Assigning portions of the PDF document

A PDF can be broken down into page ranges which then can be worked on by multiple teams.

• It's best to split the page ranges based on the content of the document.
  • Find a logical location for the split, e.g. the end of an `<H2> block.
• Open the file and delete the pages that are not in the assigned page range. This will reduce the time it takes for Acrobat to move elements around and save changes.
• Table of contents can be tagged with <TOC> and <TOCI>`, but the actual links to locations in the document can only be added after the document is stitched back together.

Stitching the PDF back together

• First make sure that tags have been added to all the content in all of the portions of the document to be stitched back together. Automated tagging can only be applied to a whole document; any untagged content will have to be tagged manually.
• TK: How does Acrobat determine the order in which to combine the documents? Is it by file name? That seems to work so far...
• Either open Acrobat Pro and select Combine files into PDF, or select the documents to combine in Explorer, right click and select Combine Files in Acrobat...
  • At the prompt click the Combine button.
• If the page numbering does not start at 0 (e.g. there are sections numbered i, ii, iii, ...), the page numbering will have to be adjusted to match the original document.
  • Navigation Pane > Page Thumbnails > select page range > right click > Number Pages...
    • Numbering: Begin New Section
    • Style: 1, 2, 3... or i, ii, iii..., etc.
    • Start: Starting number (if not the default (1))

See also

• Cleaning Up Text Artifacts In PDF Accessibility Tags
• Fixing "Tagged Content" Accessibility Errors in Acrobat XI Pro
• Validating PDF Accessibility Compliance
• Creating Accessible PDFs with Adobe Acrobat Professional (US Dept of Veterans Affairs)
• Acrobat XI Pro PDF Accessibility Repair Workflow (PDF:adobe.com)
• Acrobat Standards & Accessibility Forum (Adobe Forums)
• Acrobat X Pro Standard PDF Tags (help.adobe.com)