Adobe Acrobat Pro not tagging properly

Hello.

I have recently finished a PhD and need to make it 'accessible' to meet university requirements.

When I converted to pdf (using the Acrobat add-in in Microsoft Word), the document was automatically 'auto-tagged'. As a 'beginner' with Acrobat Pro, I have observed several things that puzzle me and am encountering some problems which I'm hoping someone can help with.

One thing I notice (from the pages that seem to be autotagged satisfactorily) is that my footnote reference numbers are tagged as 'Links'. Is this correct? Should I be changing them to 'References' in the Properties dialogue box? (It doesn't seem to prevent them working, so I've left them as they are for the moment).

My second observation is that (on a page where I have multiple footnotes), Adobe tags the first of my 'Notes' but not the rest! The other notes appear as Paragraphs within that first 'Note' tag (which, by the way, is incorrectly labelled in the type field of Properties as 'Footnote' (obviously imported from Word). I've worked out how to rectify this by creating new tags (with the first Note tag selected) and then dragging each paragraph to its new Note tag. I then drag each of these up to each one's corresponding 'Link' tag. This results in each footnote being read out (by the screen reader) directly after the Reference number (which is what is required for accessibility).

However, not all pages are coming out as auto-tagged in this fashion.

• Some pages have the Header tagged (which I don't want). And even if it's not tagged, sometimes the screen reader is still reading it, which is strange!
• On some pages, the footnote reference numbers have been tagged as 'Span' (I see this in the Content panel). Is there a way of editing these Span tags to change them to 'Link' tags? When you click on them, they still jump down to the relevant footnote, so the link is obviously present.
• Some pages have multiple instances of the same paragraph tag! (this last issue seems to have been rectified by selecting the additional tags and using 'cut' (using 'delete' didn't do anything). The next time I opened up the file, the additional ('cut') paragraph tags weren't there, so I assume that's dealt with that.

I have tried manually tagging some of these pages using the Reading Order panel. But after positioning the tags in the tagging pane with each note directly below its corresponding Reference, the screen reader does not read the note straight after the reference number as I want. I'm obviously missing something here.

I'm new to Adobe Acrobat Pro and have limited time before all this editing needs to be done (I've got as far as page 35 of 316 pages and it's taken me a couple of weeks!). So any help would be very much appreciated (I've phoned Adobe about six times - although the tech assistants have been helpful for some of my queries, and have helped me gain a better understanding of the program, it's not an ideal way of tackling detailed tagging issues (some of the assistants don't have much knowledge) and it is very time-consuming! (waiting for the email with the 'share computer' link, etc., etc.)

With many thanks,

Verity Steele

University of Southampton UK

PS. I'm not allowed to share my file, unfortunately.