Automatically extract footnotes <note> from p-tags <p> in PDF – Accessibility

[ideaism]

I exported a PDF from InDesign that needs to be digitally accessible. The problem is that Adobe InDesign places all footnotes (note) in a p-tag (p). You can, of course, manually extract the footnotes from the p-tag in Acrobat. But it's a document with almost 100 footnotes, so that would be a lot of manual work.

Is there a way to do this automatically? For example, with a (preflight) script? I hope so 😉

[creative explorer]

@ideaism You are correct: InDesign's default behavior for footnotes is to wrap the entire note, including the reference number, in a single <P> tag, which fails accessibility standards for screen readers. Unfortunately, there is no single, automatic, built-in feature or standard Preflight fix in Adobe Acrobat Pro that will automatically detect and change the tag structure of a footnote from a single <P> tag to the required nested tags (like a <Reference> tag containing a <Note>). 

While not a simple Preflight, you could try the Action Wizard with Acrobat

[Thom Parker]

If there is a way to automatically differentiate the note <P> tags from regular <P> tags, then a plug-in could be written to make this fix.  Do you know if this type of detection is possible?