6 Replies Latest reply: Feb 18, 2009 10:12 AM by (Jane_Pellicciotto) RSS

    508 compliance problems - read order and document structure

    Frapster Community Member
      We are company that is a sub-contractor for a government agency and we are required to make all of our online content 508 compliant.

      We are having serious problems with forms-enabled PDFs and read order. When isolating the various form-fields and relevant text Acrobat is perpetually combining fields from rows above and below. The same thing is happening with text. So instead of getting a logical read order everything's getting out of whack and labels are being read in groups then the fields.

      I have modified the Reading settings in preferences to no avail. The 508 test within Acrobat insists that the fields be added to the document structure or we fail the test. That makes sense of course but unfortunately Acrobat is working too hard and combining things that don't need to be combined.

      Does anyone recognize this issue and has anyone found a solution? I'm unable to find much discussion out on the internets and what I've found here in the forums is pretty sparse as well.

      Lastly - we are looking for a resource who can train/educate us on addressing these urgetn 508 issues for our organization.
        • 1. Re: 508 compliance problems - read order and document structure
          Philip Levy Adobe Employee
          Here are a couple of pointers:

          Touch Up Reading Order within Acrobat lets you manuipulate the structure and can solve many such problems.

          The Tags panel is a lower level interface that really lets you manipulate the structure but can be very tedious.

          You didn't mention how the document was created or the tages were added, but you may need to go back there to get some problems fixed.

          Finally, a company that deals with this kind of issue is Document Solutions; Duff Johnson has published on this subject. A web search for "pdf accessibility and structure" will get you lots of other references.
          • 2. Re: 508 compliance problems - read order and document structure
            Community Member
            Actually the company is Appligent Document Solutions
            www.appligent.com
            • 3. Re: 508 compliance problems - read order and document structure
              Community Member
              Frapster,
              I'm having the same problems (on a Mac). I spent (wasted) about 5 hours yesterday trying to get a simple document to work, trying every method from tagging everything in InDesign first, to tagging once in Acrobat Pro, to clearing the page structure and starting over.

              In short, what is supposed to work does not or works intermittently. In the end, I trashed Acrobat and reinstalled it (failing to get the Pro 8 patch to even work as well).

              Anyway, what I found was that doing the same thing several times yielded different results, combining boxes that aren't in the same text thread to splitting up boxes that ARE in the same text thread.

              If you get an answer, let me know!

              I also failed to get a couple elements to ever be outlined with its numbered box.

              A few things I'd like to know are:

               Can you ADD a new tagged element to a page already tagged? And if not, why not?

              Can you adjust the size/shape of the box surrounding elements? And if not, why not?

              Why can't you delete a tagged-box element?

              In the end, I think there was something wrong with Acrobat Pro. I couldn't for example add Alt text to one figure (I wasn't getting the Edit Alt text option in the Contextual menu...it was missing a bunch of items, not just greyed out), while I could add Alt text to another.

              Sorry to steal your thread. I posted elsewhere about the same problem.

              I can't believe we're the only people trying in vain to make 508-compliant PDFs. This is insane.

              Adobe? Are you there listening?
              • 4. Re: 508 compliance problems - read order and document structure
                Community Member
                For what it's worth, I just saw a reference here to a new 141-page manual about accessible PDFs. Enjoy!

                http://indesignsecrets.com/creating-accessible-pdf-documents.php
                • 5. Re: 508 compliance problems - read order and document structure
                  Philip Levy Adobe Employee
                  If you use the tags panel, you can do anything with structure, it just may not be easy.

                  If you are using the Touch up reading order tool, you should be able to restructure the structure on existing pages and so on. You can't change the graphic bounding boxes on actual content. Touch up reading order uses these bounds to decide, when you drag a rectangle, whether a given page element is included. This could be the root of your problems because if the bounding boxes are wacky, you will never be able to select them in a consistent, intuitive way. This is more likely to be a problem with InDesign content with lots of graphics than with, say, content created in a word processing system like MS Word.

                  If this is a document you can share, I can take a look. Email to first initial, last name at adobe.com.

                  If the document has lots of overlapping text and graphics, this will complicate matters but you may end up wanting to set the Actual Text attribute for the graphics to be the overlaid text. It starts to depend on your audience and what will work with screen readers or other assistive technology they are using.

                  Also, did you try Advanced > Accessibility > Add Tags To Document and let it try to do it autmoatically for you?
                  • 6. Re: 508 compliance problems - read order and document structure
                    Community Member
                    Philip,
                    You are so kind to offer your help.

                    It seems to be working...for now. I say for now because features that worked one minute didn't the next. I had to keep quitting Acrobat and relaunching. When I did, I could do what I couldn't do before.

                    Eventually, I reinstalled Acrobat and, interestingly, one bounding box encompassing 2 unrelated items was now split (as I wanted it.)

                    So, some of my problems seemed to be the software. I spent so much time that I didn't want to go back and start over to see if I would encounter the same issues as before.

                    But to answer your question, yes, I did try adding tags from within Acrobat. I also tried clearing the page structure and tried to draw bounding boxes around the content. It would only allow me to do one.

                    In the end, I went back to my InDesign layout file and created the tagged structure in there. But Acrobat did not honor the order of my items. It also combined or split things that I didn't want it to.
                    I also made sure that no text boxes overlapped anything (except where I had no choice). This was all before reinstalling the software though. It may be fine next time around. But if not, I might keep your contact info!

                    Are there tips for building your InDesign layout in the "right" way knowing you need to make an accessible PDF later?

                    Again, I apologize for my hijacking this guy's thread. I'm on a Mac, not Windows but that probably doesn't matter.