Accessibility tagging next to impossible

Question

Hi there,I'm required for my job to accessibility tag a lot of corporate and council documents. Alot of these are 30 pages plus.Every time I go to do so, there are different problems each time. Sometimes with Word exported docs, sometimes with InDesign exported docs.If it's an Indesign designed document, I have to manually edit the pdf so that all boxes and containers are behind text, as whenever I tag text it disappears behind boxes.Easy enough work around but hours of work for my clients, especially tagging complex items.Sometimes with these documents, if I tag alt text for one figure/image it'll update the alt text in EVERY image across the page to be the same text. I cannot unlink these, there's no workaround I've found. If it's a Word document however, my problems are even worse. If it autotags a document, sometimes a 'span' label will apear and if I try to override this, change the order, or tag manually, it won't let me re-tag over the top, so I just have to accept the order that it is in.Sometimes if I tag a figure with a caption and re-open the document, it won't let me see the alt-text. Sometimes if I've tagged a whole document and can see the tags, it says that no tags are found when trying to read it out.Honestly I've spent so much time troubleshooting, making sure Acrobat is the latest version, reading countless forums, but there's so little support for accessibility tagging?! If I'm paying 40 bucks a month for an ongoing service spanning years I would really like to be able to use this service, I can't just pass on these costs to clients for troubleshooting alone (which takes almost double the time of tagging a document)I don't often write big spiels online but I'm just really stuck and DREAD every time I have to tag something and I wish Adobe would spend a little time making this accessibility feature actually accessible.

Bevi Chagnon - PubCom.com · Answer

All of the problems you describe are caused by poor construction of the original source document — before the PDF was created. A source document is the original Word, PowerPoint, or InDesign file from which the PDF was exported.

Without seeing your document, it's difficult tell exactly what caused each accessibility failure point, but nonetheless, they should be fixable in Acrobat DC Pro. But that would require extensive training in PDF Remediation for you, and probably some additional tools.

But the best solution for accessible PDFs is to learn how to build an accessible source document, and export it correctly to an accessible PDF. Most of the accessibility should be there — tags, reading orders, alt text on graphics, etc. And the PDF file should need only a few minutes of review, testing, tweaks to some elements, and verifying it's compliant to the PDF/UA-1 standard.

It's so much faster for your organization to publish accessible PDFs, so much cheaper to produce them, and you'll have a much more compliant PDF in the end. What's not to like with those results!

See if you can spearhead your organization to create a better workflow, starting with templates and training for your authors and graphic designers. The money spent at the front end of the workflow is an excellent investment that reaps the long-term benefits.

I don't mean to shill for my firm, but at any time, we always have 1-2 clients that we guide through this process, from government agencies to large corporations, colleges, and independent small businesses.

It is a change of how your organization creates documents, from start to finish, from the top-most managers to the rest of the staff.

You shouldn't need to do so much work on the PDFs you receive. And Acrobat's autotag utility, even though it has improved with each new version, still doesn't get most of what's needed in a PDF. There's no way any software program can figure out what the human authors were trying to do.

Here's a graphic from one of our training classes: Everyone in the workflow must do their part to make accessible documents. Everyone!

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