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maxwithdax
Community Expert
maxwithdaxCommunity Expert
Community Expert
August 28, 2020
Question

Fixing decorative items creates <Artifact> tag?

  • August 28, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 3856 views

When you have elements with no alt-text you get accessibility errors when running the checker. However, if you right click on the error and choose "fix" and walk through the items and mark them as decorative, instead of actually making them an artifact it simply changes the tag to "Artifact" which is not a valid tag and creates other errors. You then have to go in and properly designate the objects as Artifacts properly for the other errors to go away. VERY Frustrating. Come on Adobe Acrobat!

 

This is a repeatable condition and needs to be fixed immediately please!

 

Setting something as an artifact is a state and not a valid tag in the tags tree. Very frustrating that one tool designed to fix an issue actually creates other issues.

 

https://youtu.be/cLpXgisBgeg

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    2 replies

    B
    Bramreem
    Participating Frequently
    March 1, 2021

          The element keeps being listed in the tag panel, unlike artifacts which are defined as such in another way. And usually the content panel mentions all artifacts, but after this action the content panel still calls it a ‘figure’.

          In a document I tested most recently, the accessibility check at first found 16 images in need of an alt text. After typing an alt text for four of them and marking the 12 others as decorative figures, the checkpoint “Figures alternate text” was passed, but the test failed for exactly those 12 objects on “Other elements alternate text”.

          In other words, the 12 decorative figures moved from ‘figures’ in need of an alt text to ‘other elements’ with the same problem.

          I do not have a screen reader of braille reader to test if this would cause a problem in real life, but at least it is cluttering the tag list and it is confusing for the person who wants to check accessibility before sending a document out.

    B
    Bramreem
    Participating Frequently
    March 3, 2021

    The start of my message was lost during writing it:

     

    Hello, I also had the impression that marking an object as ‘decorative figure’ does not do what it should do. Nice that you find the reason!

    brennanyoung
    brennanyoung
    Participating Frequently
    August 31, 2020

    Nice catch! I notice that the tagged pdf "best practice guide" talks about Artifacts as a semantic category, which should be indicated somehow in compliant pdf/ua files, but gives only very sparse recommendations about how to actually do this.

    https://www.pdfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/TaggedPDFBestPracticeGuideSyntax.pdf

    Also this guide states that the content of artifacts should be accessible (in contrast to WAI-ARIA's role=presentation), but again the exact mechanisms for doing so are not given. For example if an artifact contained a link explicitly tagged as a <Link>, which is not an unthinkable possibility - this would fail according to Matterhorn Protocol Checkpoint 01-004, which disallows tagged content inside artifacts. (Links aren't even formally specified children for tables of content!) So there are evidently some holes in the spec here.

    When you say "You then have to go in and properly designate the objects as Artifacts properly", how are you doing that?

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