Accessibility of tables - does it have to take hours?

Thanks a lot for the comments, this helped me a lot. Although I had axesPDF and Commonlook in mind, I hoped that there is a cheaper program or a build-in function available for Acrobat Pro. Let's hope that Adobe starts to take accessibility serious...

@Janina5FAF, might be able to save you some work.

For simple tables (those with regular TH column headers and row headers), you do not need to use Header IDs and associate them with <TD> data cells.

The <TH> tags themselves provide sufficient accessibility. See Sec. 5.4 in the PDF Syntax Guide (free download from the PDF Association, https://www.pdfa.org/resource/tagged-pdf-best-practice-guide-syntax/

The only time when Header IDs and <TD> associations are required is when you have a complex table:

• Multi-row ccolumn header
• Multi-column row header
• Sub-headers within the table

For those tables where this must be done, you can automatically generate the header IDs within Acrobat:

1. Launch Table Editor.
2. Right click on any cell and select Autogenerate Header Cells IDs.

But there's no built-in help to associate the <TD> data cells to their respective Header cells via the IDs.

You can suggest these features be added by going to www.Acrobat.UserVoice.com, the website where customers like us submit feature requests and report bugs. Here are two you might want to vote for:

• Autogenerate TD associations, https://acrobat.uservoice.com/forums/590923-acrobat-for-windows-and-mac/suggestions/43719729-pdf-tables-are-not-tagged-correctly-3-header-ids
• https://acrobat.uservoice.com/forums/590923-acrobat-for-windows-and-mac/suggestions/41399425-pdfmaker-set-the-scope-row-span-and-column-span

If you want these features, we must vote them up! Adobe looks at the number of votes to  help decide what goes on their to-do list.

So Vote for Accessibility Features!

.

Well, as long as name brands are being promoted in this public forum, I'll add a couple more that can help you, in addition to Chad's company's Axes programs. All of them are paid programs, anywhere from $500 - thousands per license, except where noted.

CommonLook has several tools https://commonlook.com/:

• CommonLook Word plug-in allows you to control and export more compliant PDFs.
• CommonLook PDF is a major tool for remediating and validating PDFs. Very good with tables and TOCs.
• CommonLook Validator is a free program that examines PDFs for compliance, but doesn't correct them.

You can read an objective review of the programs at https://webaim.org/resources/commonlook/

And for those exporting from InDesign, Aoxio's Made To Tag makes more compliant PDFs from InDesign layout files. It's also built into QuarkXpress, another desktop publishing program. https://www.axaio.com/doku.php/en:products:madetotag

And then there are the preflighting tools in Acrobat Pro itself. No extra cost. It corrects many major flaws in PDFs, but not the ones you want for tables.

--Bevi (who doesn't have any financial interest in any of the above programs.

Unfortunately (and as you've discovered), The Table Editor in Acrobat and the table editing tools overall, are powerful in Acrobat but also very limited. If you have a lot of these, yes you'll spend a lot of time remediating these tables. You may want to take a look at axesPDF (or even axesWord if you're exporting from Word), as it can make the process much faster.