Headings - Appropriate Nesting

[JMUK]

A Graphic Designer build a very long pdf document (Strategic Plan) and it passed Accessibility test in Adobe, however our website stated it failed for:

• PDF headings not following a logical order WCAG A 1.3.1
• The first heading should be a H1WCAG A 1.3.1

Is there an easy way of seeing all the Headings in order Adobe Acrobat Pro DC? ideally I would love to see a list of them all, so I can manually check/fix issues:

<H1

<H2

<H3

<H3

<H5  **** wrong - so would fix this as it should be <H4

[mary helens142890]

If you've run the Accessibilty Checker and it give you an error for "nested headings" fail(s), if you open that fail's drop-down and select the "show in contents panel" option, it will take you directly to the heading that is failing.

The fail will occur when you have an improper sequence in the headings (like the one you showd above, where it went from an <H3> to an <H5>....without an <H4>.

If there are multiple fails, you can "go to" each one (individually) by selecting it in the accessibility checker's list of nested heading fails.

Hope this helps.

[mary helens142890]

see attached image.

[JMUK]

Hi,

Thanks for the feedback - this is what i have been doing and it does work, but often leads to more nesting issues as a knock effect.

I was hoping that there was a way of only seeing all the headers in a cloumn, so you could fix them all in one go - a lot of the documents I have been looking at are over 100 pages.

I will keep on doing it this way - thanks again. 

[hammer0909]

MaryHelen is right about the nesting but I'd also make sure that the first heading tag in your document is an <H1>. Starting with anything else will also cause the error. That may address your problem since you only have one issue. If you click on the error in the report it should show you which heading is the offender.

Unfortunately InDesign has a tendency of adding container elements to the Tags pane which prevents you from easily seeing those heading tags without opening each <Sect> tag to see them. I might suggest downloading a free plug-in called PDFGoHTML. You can get it here and it's totally free. It's a plug-in for Acrobat and when you run it by going to the Plug-ins menu in Acrobat and choosing Callas PDFGoHTML it will render your PDF as a web page. Click on the structure tags category at the top of that web page and it will make it super-easy to see what heading tags (and other tags for that matter) you have applied to the content in your document.

It's worth mentioning that you can also use the free PAC 3 checker which provides a Screen Reader Preview similar to what PDFGoHTML provides.