Merged Cells in Adobe Acrobat (Accessibility)

Forum|Forum|5 years ago
February 18, 2021
1 reply
4785 views

Hello everyone,

We all know that merged cells in a table placed in a pdf document can be inaccessible.

However, according to this article from the Mozilla Foundation, in HTML there would be no problem with merged cells as long as they are labelled correctly. Here is the link

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/HTML/Tables/Advanced

However, when we have a word document with a table containing merged cells and it is saved as a pdf when passing the accessibility analysis in Acrobat it can cause problems. Does anyone have any idea if there is a way to make the merged cells in a document to be considered as accessible?

Thank you in advance

Standards and accessibility

This topic has been closed for replies.

Dave__M

Community Expert

If you haven't explored it yet, using your Reading Order tool in the Accessibility toolset, right click on the table and open the Table Editor from the menu. There, you should be able to select the cell, and then identify how a cell spans multiple rows or columns.

My best,

Dave

Julián Moreno - DatabisAuthor

Participating Frequently

Hello Dave

Thank you very much for your input.
This I had already seen and thought about.

But do you think for sure that this will make the table 100% accessible?
If this is the case and screen readers, used by blind people, are able to interpret them, this would be great !!!

🙂

See you!!

Dave__M

Community Expert

I have never submitted a PDF for 508 approval using this technique. But I have seen it in demonstrations, and that is alleged what it is supposed to do. Maybe someone with more experience with the table edited & merged cells can add to the conversation.

My best,

Dave

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