Adobe Community: Message List - For accessibility, are there any MS-Word Styles that a PDF file cannot use or recognise?

Re: For accessibility, are there any MS-Word Styles that a PDF file cannot use or recognise?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Fri, 30 May 2014 04:15:24 GMT

As this is a forum on the PDF specification, I assumed that you were familiar with ISO 32000-1:2008, the PDF standard/specification.

Title and Subtitle are not standard tags in PDF - nor in HTML or in EPUB. There are proposals out for PDF 2.0 (ISO 32000-2) to include Title, but that won't be for another few years. However, you can use a custom tag (meaning any name you want) to tag those elements yourself using the Tagging feature of Acrobat. And whether the screen reader will process it depends on the software and its version.

Re: For accessibility, are there any MS-Word Styles that a PDF file cannot use or recognise?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 29 May 2014 17:40:14 GMT

Thank you for your reply. I am very new to all of this and am not sure what you mean by "Custom tag". When I convert a Word .docx file to PDF, I was told that PDF does not understand Title and Subtitle styles but that it automatically converts the first 6 heading styles to H1-H6 tags, Tables to table tags (T, TH, TD, etc) and Lists to List and List Item tags. These are, in turn, used by assistive technology to guide the reader through the document. So does the conversion to PDF format not convert the TItle and Subtitle styles to PDF's own respective tags? When you say I could use them as custom tags, does that mean I would manually have to define them in the PDF file, using Adobe Acrobat XI Pro? And would the screen reader software understand a custom tag? Thank you for any clarification you can provide. LPS

Re: For accessibility, are there any MS-Word Styles that a PDF file cannot use or recognise?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 29 May 2014 13:58:01 GMT

PDF (like HTML & EPUB) has no native semantic concept of a Title (or Subtitle), but there is nothing preventing you from using them as a custom tag.

For accessibility, are there any MS-Word Styles that a PDF file cannot use or recognise?

forums_noreply@adobe.com — Thu, 29 May 2014 13:47:38 GMT

I have been told that one cannot use the MS-Word Styles "Title" and "Subtitle" in a PDF file, from an accessibility perspective but I cannot find anything to support this claim. Can anyone tell me if this is true and if so, why these styles are not supported/recognised?

Thank you,

LPS