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Accessible Calendar

New Here ,
Jul 19, 2017 Jul 19, 2017

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I have been tasked with converting a Word document containing the school district calendar to an accessible pdf. Each month has the month and year as H2, followed by a table with calendar for the month. The days are marked with various symbols to indicate events.

I suspect that someone using a screen reader will not want all those days read aloud, and would prefer to have just the events listed. I also don't think the person cares that a school holiday is marked with a red triangle while a testing day is marked with an orange pentagon.

I have done the following in Word:

  1. Marked the table header.
  2. Added alt text and titles to each table to list the important dates.
  3. Set the alt text on each symbol to "" to tag it as decorative.

As far as I can tell, only the table header was picked up when I converted the document to a pdf.

Here are my questions:

  1. Is there a way to mark the drawing objects as decorative in Word so that I don't have to do it manually in the pdf?
  2. Is there a way to have Acrobat pick up the alt text and title from the tables?
  3. I want the screen reader to omit reading the entire month and just read the alternate text. Which of the following things do I need to do?
    1. Add the alt text for the entire month to the H2 tag above the table that names the month
    2. Add the alt text for the entire month to the Table tag.
    3. Add the alt text individually to the appropriate table data tag.
    4. Change the Table tag to a Figure tag.
    5. Remove tags. If so, which ones? (I tried changing the Table tag to a Figure tag and deleting the tags for everything underneath, but that created more accessibility errors.)

Thank you for your help.

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Standards and accessibility

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Explorer ,
Jul 21, 2017 Jul 21, 2017

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Unfortunately, Word doesn't export the alt text of a table into the PDF. At least not with Word 2013 for Windows.

There is no way to mark content to be decorative and an artifact. The plugin axesPDF for Word might help here, but I don't know it for sure.

I've got another suggestion to try:

  1. You could create your calendars in Excel.
  2. After that you import it in Word as an object. The alt text, which describes all actions in that month, will be available in the PDF.
  3. The object is going to be inside a <InlineShape> which is mapped to <Sect>. So I would change the role mapping entry to <Figure> or add an additional <Figure> inside that <InlineShape>.

What do you think about that approach?

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New Here ,
Jul 23, 2022 Jul 23, 2022

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I know that this is now five years old, but would you be willing to share your Word and/or Excel templates?

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