An accidental PDF bomb
,WTPDF: Role Mapping
,Acrobat: The disparity of tagging methods
,Accessibility myths: The misguided war on merged cells
,One of the stranger accessibility myths that I often run into is that merged cells in tables are to be avoided at all costs. This is entirely antithetical to semantic structuring of data and really points to a larger issue: often, folks who are doing and talking about accessibility have no concept of tabular structure, data relationships, and the importance of context. This goes both ways – often, folks that I receive documents from will have put multiple pieces of data in a single cell, either because they don’t know how to make the cell border invisible, or because they’re afraid to merge a cell that spans all the pieces of data.
Accessibility myths: The deceitful panacea of alt text
,One of my favorite1 accessibility myths is this pervasive idea that alternate text is some kind of accessibility panacea. I get it – it’s theoretically2 a thing that content creators of any skill level can do to make their content more accessible. Because of these things (and because it is technically a required attribute on <img>
tags in HTML), it seems to be one of the first things people learn about accessibility. For the uninitiated, alternate text (from here on out, alt text) is metadata attached to an image that assistive tech (such as a screen reader) will use to present a description of an image (since we don’t all have neural network coprocessors to do deep machine-learning and describe images for us).
This is all very good, if we have a raster-based image with no other information to work with. The problem is, we should almost never have that image to begin with. Very few accessibility problems are actually solved with alt text. For starters, raster images have a fixed resolution. And when users with limited vision (but not enough-so to warrant use of a screen reader) attempt to zoom in on these as they are wont to do, that ability is limited. Best case scenario, the image is at print resolution, 300dpi. This affords maybe a 300% zoom, and even then there may be artifacting. Another common pitfall is that images (particularly of charts and the like) are often used as a crutch when a user can’t figure out a clean way to present their information. Often this means color is used as a means of communicating information (explicitly prohibited by §508), or it means that the information is such a jumble that users with learning disabilities are going to have incredible difficulty navigating it.
Accessibility myths: The delusion of accessibility checkers
,There is a delusion that I deal with, professionally, day in and day out. That nearly any piece of authoring software, be it Microsoft Word or Adobe Acrobat, has some inbuilt mechanism for assessing the accessibility of a document. Before I get into the details, let me just come out and say that if you are not already an accessibility professional, these tools cannot help you. I understand the motivation, but in my experience, these things do more harm than good. They allow unversed consumers to gain a false sense of understanding about the output of their product. That sounds incredibly condescending, but that’s honestly how it should work when you’re talking about fields that require extensive training.
Tagging in Acrobat from the keyboard
,Since much of my work revolves around §508 compliance, I spend a lot of time restructuring tags in Acrobat. Unfortunately you can’t just handwrite out these tags à la HTML, you have to physically manipulate a tree structure. The Tags panel is very conducive to mouse use, and because Adobe is Adobe, not very conducive to keyboard use. Many important tasks are missing readily available keyboard shortcuts, and it has taken me a while to be able to largely ditch the mouse1 and instead use the keyboard to very quickly restructure the tags on very long, very poorly tagged documents.
A couple of notes – this assumes a Windows machine, and one with a Menu key2. While I generally prefer working on MacOS, I’m stuck with Windows at work, so these are my efficiencies. Windows may actually have the leg up here, since the Acrobat keyboard support is so poor, and MacOS does not have a Menu key equivalent. Additionally, this applies to Acrobat XI, it may or may not apply to current DC versions. Finally, all of this information is discoverable, but I haven’t really seen a primer laid out on it. If nothing else perhaps it will help a future version of myself who forgets all of this.