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Matthew Clara
Participant
April 18, 2016
Answered

MS Word footer ends up first item in content reading order when converted to PDF

  • April 18, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 887 views

Anyone else have this problem?  We have a department wide letterhead template (MS Word 2010) with header and footer and when converted to PDF using Acrobat Pro XI (v11.0.13.17), the footer ends up at the top of the reading order list.  Anyway to stop that from happening?

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer a_C_student16379412

Hi Matthew, when you refer to the reading order, are you looking in the Content Pane, the Z-Order Pane, or the Tags Pane - or maybe somewhere else? The Tags Pane provides the reading order for Assistive Technology (AT). As a general rule repeating footers should be marked as background artifacts, so they will not appear in the Tags Pane and will be ignored by AT. In my experience conversion from Word to PDF sometimes does a better job than other times, but there is always some amount of manual fix-ups to do to achieve an accessible PDF.

1 reply

a_C_student16379412
a_C_student16379412Correct answer
Inspiring
April 18, 2016

Hi Matthew, when you refer to the reading order, are you looking in the Content Pane, the Z-Order Pane, or the Tags Pane - or maybe somewhere else? The Tags Pane provides the reading order for Assistive Technology (AT). As a general rule repeating footers should be marked as background artifacts, so they will not appear in the Tags Pane and will be ignored by AT. In my experience conversion from Word to PDF sometimes does a better job than other times, but there is always some amount of manual fix-ups to do to achieve an accessible PDF.

M
Matthew ClaraAuthor
Participant
April 19, 2016

Thanks for the response.  I was working primarily in the Content Pane.  If the Tags Pane is for assistive technology, what's the content pane for?  Thanks again.

a_C_student16379412
a_C_student16379412
Inspiring
April 19, 2016

For me, the Content Pane comes in handy if a page element seems to disappear because it is hiding behind another page element. Usually this happens with text on a shaded box, for example. Moving the text after the shaded box in the Content Pane causes it to re-appear. Also, on rare occasions I need to artifact some element that is not visible on the page - I can usually find it in the Content Pane. And I believe the Adobe Read Out Loud feature uses the Content Pane Order.

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