Creating accessible PDFs: Manual Tag Structure – Bugs

[sabiner21496840]

I am creating an accessible PDF with Forms. The InDesign File with the base layout has many layers on top of each other. I was able to simplify it without changing the layout but after creating the interactive Forms i have to add a manual Tag Structure (Automatic creation has horrible results) which is a lot of work but is okay. My problem is, Acrobat does not add the Elements in the right order, so i have to shift them so the Order of the Tags is correct again. But when i do, Acrobat behaves very random: sometimes it changes the order, sometimes it doesn't. That was a problem in previous versions, but i still managed to finish the document structure with patience. Does anyone else have the same problem with accessible PDFs? Is there a solution?

[a_C_student]

I have much better results putting the tags in the correct order using the Tags pane rather than the Order pane.

[sabiner21496840]

Do you use the automatic creation (Acrobat) of Tags or do you sort the tags that come with the pdf from InDesign in my case? (I tried that, even though i don't understand how the structure is supposed to look like and there seem to be bugs there too – elements dissappearing etc)

[a_C_student]

I typically start with the tags generated by the source application (usually MS Word in my case) and manually remediate from there. Not sure what you mean by elements disappearing. Are tags disappearing (I have not experienced this), or elements in the visual representation of the page (for this you can use the Content pane - place the hidden element after the hiding element), or the page as read by a screen reader (could be caused by various things)? There is a very useful free Acrobat plugin, by the way, for displaying a PDF in the way it would be read by a screen reader - pdfGoHTML from Callas software.

[Mally]

I only use the Tags panel to rearrange, rename, delete or create tags--anything to do with tags. You always want to work here. I never use the Order view. Sometimes when I am remediating a PDF that came from an InDesign file, I use the layers panel to turn off layers an artist may have left turned on, or that are somehow appearing and causing me problems. Keep at it. Acrobat is not intuitive to me, and not a production tool, yet I use it as that.