New subject: Accessibility and Tagged PDFs: Bugs and Feature Requests

3 Jul 2015

      On Wed Jul 1, 18:47:57 CEST 2015, Hans Hagen wrote:
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/Artifact
   BMC
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   EMC
i'll add the simple variant (i see no need to add properties to 
something that is supposed to be ignored anyway)
thanks!
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2.) Images without alternate text:
i'll pass the label to the tag as alt text
\externalfigure[t:/sources/cow.pdf][label=whatever]
Again, thanks!
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3.) Tag names of the resulting tag structure:
Section 14.8.4 of [1] defines standard structure types,
The set of those standard tags is rather limited and imo one of the 
craziest things in pdf as we then end up with abuse of those html tags 
(and probably endless discussions on what to map onto what). I don't 
even have a clue what it would add to the concept either. Reflow is a 
braindead thing anyway.
Indeed, the set of those tags is very limited. Unfortunately, as 
far as I know, some screen readers (for the visually impaired)
use these as navigation aids, i.e. press button "jump to next section",
and the reader will look for the next section marked as <Sect> or something.

Is it difficult to make the mapping user-defineable in the source tex-file? 
Say, like such a command:
\definemapping[
  section=Sect,
  sectiontitle=H
  sectionnumber=H,
  ...
  tablerow=TR
  ...
]

It would then give users the control on what to map onto what, depending
on what kind of documents they create.
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All in all, these seem to be the only issues that prevent accessible PDF
documents with context. For those within an organization where
accessibility is required legally for all publications, compliance to at
least Acrobat Pro's checks is a huge issue. I do not know how difficult
these things are to implement in Context (personally I am just lost in
the code), but looking at e.g. tex.stackexchange
for question related to accessibility, this is indeed a major obstacle
for several people.
In fact adding pdf tagging to context was rather easy. Some time was 
So, it's not that difficult to add features, more a matter of priorities 
and motivation (apart from the fact that my acrobat is a bit old by now 
so I cannot really test).
I can fully understand that such things are not of the highest priority. 
Nevertheless accessibility plays more and more a role, e.g. lately, even
conferences like http://chi2015.acm.org/authors/guide-to-an-accessible-submission/
require accessible pdfs (the workflow they suggest, i.e. tagging a pdf
by acrobat pro after compiling of course doesn't work at all - the generated
structure is useless).

Hence, for some users, it makes all the difference. For example for me and
some other friends, it would allow to change from using Microsoft Word to 
a ConTeXt based workflow. 

cheers

- Dominik

Re: [NTG-context] Accessibility and Tagged PDFs: Bugs and Feature Requests

Dominik Klein

Hans Hagen

Alan BRASLAU

Hans Hagen

Dr. Dominik Klein

Hans Hagen

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participants (4)