Participant

Question

Tagging content is creating empty tags

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
April 23, 2019
2 replies
3298 views

I'm so frustrated. I'm new to this and I think I'm following the instructions I've seen in various online training and manuals, but I keep running into bugs and issues. I don't know if it's because I'm working with a document that was originally a scan?

Most pressing issues:

1. With the Reading Order pane open, I select text and apply a tag from the tool and the tag appears in the Tags panel, it's just an empty tag. When I go into the Content pane, I see text there, nested under a container heading tag. This has happened **numerous** times. Can't figure it out.

2. I'm following the instructions at https://webaim.org/techniques/acrobat/forms#formfields for tagging the form section of my doc, but when I try to tag the form fields (with the "find element" tool, search for "unmarked annotations", select "tag element"), I'm not getting a pop-up dialog with an ability to add a tag.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

This topic has been closed for replies.

hammer0909

Community Expert

I would agree with Dave__M in that it’s always good to start with a clean document. It’s not always possible but when you start with a PDF, you never know how the file was created and what kind of remnants exist in the document that could cause the frustration that you were experiencing.

dianag40744861Author

Participant

Thanks all! Yeah, after a week or so of experience now, I think next time I would strip all the formatting and start from scratch, rather than trying to add on to whatever was done to the doc who knows how many years ago.

Dave__M

Community Expert

When teaching classes that touch on accessibility issues, I always preach (sometimes to deer-in-the-headlights faces) that if one doesn't merely type, but actually does 'word processing' in MS Word (or similar app), the PDF Maker/converter can actually do a good job of converting the structure to workable tags in the PDF. Properly using styles in a source doc can put you in a good position for success. But I still see folks pressing the space bar 5 times at the start of a paragraph or hitting the Bold/Bigger buttons for 'headings'... it drives me up a tree!

Good luck.

My best,

Dave

raeben3

Inspiring

1. Can you post the PDF or a part of it? This is a puzzle. I do not have a similar result with documents I have scanned and OCR'd. When you select the Tag in the Tags panel with Highlight Content on is the text highlighted?

2. As I recall, there is no popup. The find element tool will place the element you are tagging in whichever tag you have selected in the Tags Panel.

dianag40744861Author

Participant

Thanks so much for replying, Raeben3! So, I gave up. I found a Word version of the doc, edited what I could in Word and when I brought that version into Acrobat Pro everything worked the way it should.

I think (this is a guess based on very little experience with this) the file was corrupted-- possibly because it started as a scan and then had form fields added and was OCR'd along time ago in a very old version of Acrobat Pro.

Dave__M

Community Expert

It's always a great thing to find a source document and properly create the PDF yourself. It usually can solve a bunch of issues from when you inherit someone else's document.

My best,

Dave

Sign up

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Sign in to Adobe Community

To post, reply, or follow discussions, please sign in with your Adobe ID.

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded