Accessibility Checker - Tagged Content Failed - Ghost content, can't find

[laurar79508600]

Hi,

I'm at my wit's end here.

I'm remediating a PDF and one page keeps failing the checker. 

• When I right click to show in content panel, of course it's not found. Typical, lol.
• I've used Find in tags to look for untagged content. There does seem to be something invisible toward the bottom of the page that the only clue from Acrobat is that it's a form xobject, but I don't know how to locate it.
• I've zoomed way into the pdf at 400% to look for it in case it's really small. 
• I've gone throught the content panel and made sure everything that should be artifacted has been artifacted.
• I've selected all the empty spaces on the page and backgrounded in TURO.
• I've done a page replace and manually re-tagged.
• I removed hidden from the original pdf and done another page replace, rechecked content panel and retagged.

I'm out of ideas at this point. Any of your ideas would be appreciated.

P.S. I'm under NDA and can't share the pdf on a forum.

[Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com]

Two options:

1. In Acrobat Pro, drill down in the Report panel and see if you can expand the items enough to find the item. It should highlight the problem object when selected in the report.
2. There's another checker to try, PAC3 which is free from Axes For at https://www.access-for-all.ch/en/pdf-lab/pdf-accessibility-checker-pac.html (It's available only on Windows, and as far as I know, there aren't any decent accessibility checkers, other than Acrobat Pro itself, on the Mac.)

PAC3's a bit tricky to figure out how to use because the user manual misses quite a lot.

1. Once it's launched, drag and drop your PDF into the blue square on the upper left.
2. Then click the Results in Detail button, which opens the report in another window.
3. Drill down through the red X's to find the item that fails.

PAC3 doesn't fix the problem, but you can at least identify it and then correct it in Acrobat.

[laurar79508600]

Hi Bevi, 

Thanks for your advice. 

The first solution I'd already tried to no avail.

I tried PAC3. All I could narrow it down to was untagged text content which it showed is off the bottom of the page. I don't know how I can identify or correct it if it's not even on the page. I suspected this already since using Find untagged content also indicated there was untagged form xobjects off the bottom of the page. 

Any ideas?

[laurar79508600 · Accepted solution]

Figured it out, omg.

I created a copy of the pdf then used the protection panel to remove hidden content.

In the hidden content panel, I reviewed each removal one by one and found that there was hidden text content on that page for the copyright footer.

I then went into the original pdf and opened the content panel and went to that page.

I expanded the content items and voila - found that there were three artifacts which contained xobjects. I deleted all three along with the copyright footer.

Ran the checker, totally passed.

Re-added the footer and it passed again!

What threw me off was that I thought once something was artifacted, that there was no way it could still throw an error in the checker.

[Rick27474169bh5i]

what are the exact step to do this?