Tagged PDF files from ColdFusion.

[Newsgroup_User]

Does anybody know about the current -- and maybe future -- capabilities
of ColdFusion tools that generate PDF files, such as <cfreport...> and
<cfdcoument...> tags, to create 'tagged' PDF files?

Tagged PDF files are PDF documents that have structural markup
information along the lines of HTML to give accessibility aids, such as
screen readers, more information on what content the PDF document contains.

I have been looking high and low for information on how one may create
tagged PDF's -- or add tag markup to a created PDF -- with ColdFusion.
I'm getting a sinking feeling this is just beyond the capability of our
beloved tool!

[Bouton.Jones]

Another unanswered question.  This one from 10 years ago.

There are currently two tags for converting HTML to PDF.  CFdocument and CFHTMLtoPDF.

CFdocument will not generate a tagged PDF.  Adobe doesn't plan on fixing that.

CFHTMLtoPDF was introduced in ColdFusion 11.  It generates a tagged PDF --- except the image descriptions (ALT attribute values) are not being exported to the PDF.  As of this reply the Adobe intends to fix that in the next release.

I suggest using CFHTMLtoPDF but avoid using images.  If images must be included, you might caption the images with plain text (in the manner of newspapers or news magazine) and use the aria-describedby and id attrbutes to anchor the captions to the images.

Note that you must start with an accessible HTML document with strict (semantic) HTML and perhaps some ARIA.

I hope this suggestion helps someone.