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In the foreign translation world we often need to make PDF files ADA compliant. We have several PDF files we created in InDesign in Bengali that are failing due to "character encoding errors".
The first contact with Adobe via the "Adobe Virtual Assistant" the Adobe rep said that the Bengali language is not supported by Acrobat's OCR function, but then transferred me to a tech person, who said I had to reinstall Acrobat and everything would be fine. It was not, and the uninstall and reinstall did not help. Still same issues. Tried 8 different fonts. Tried it on different Macs. Tried it on a PC. All with the same result.
Second contact with Adobe, the tech remoted into my computer and tried working with the PDF with the same results. They have left it to me to remove all the text and try making a PDF file by adding back text block by text block to see where the issues arise. First block of text I added back had character encoding error.
I am at a loss. Does anyone have experience with getting Bengali PDF files ADA compliant? Is it even possible? Is there a list somewhere from Adobe that shows language(s) that are not supported within the Accesibility Tool?
We also were asked about Khmer (Cambodian). I did a test of two files and same results as the Bengali.
This is for a US local government website so they need their PDF files be ADA compliant.
Any help/insight would be appreciated. Thank you!
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I appreciate this may be way too late to help with your issue, but this might be useful for anyone else looking for a workaround. I had this same issue with generating accessible Bengali PDFs, and the only font that did not result in a character encoding error in the accessibility checker was Arial Unicode MS; Adobe Bengali, Myriad Bengali, Noto Bengali all failed. I exported these as Standard:PDF/X-4:2010 / Compatibility:Acrobat 7 (PDF 1.6) from InDesign.
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Were you able to get any information if it was possible to make Khmer compliant? A list of supported languages would be so helpful!
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You may get better results using PAC (https://pac.pdf-accessibility.org/en) than Acrobat, since it appears Acrobat's accessibility checker is broken for non-Western encodings. PAC will check against WCAG and PDF/UA but I'm not sure about ADA.