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PDF/UA-2 Accessibility Standard
Should you use the new accessibilitly tags in your PDFs?
No.
Here's why...
The standard is too new and not ready for use.
Sure, it adds new accessibility tags to our documents, but they're not yet recognized by screen readers and other assistive technologies.
That means if those tags are used in your PDF, they'll be voiced or presented as plain body text. And that could be very detrimental to the user's experience.
For screen reader users, this is very UNhelpful for at least 2 of the new tags — <Title> and <Artifact>.
<Title> Tag
In our testing with screen readers, when <Title> is used instead of the traditional <H1> Heading 1 tag, it isn't identified by screen readers and instead is voiced as if it's body text.
This doesn't clue screen reader users that there is a title in the document, nor what text is in the title. Users will have to infer the title from the jumble of words they hear. For many documents, the title text is not obvious when it's mixed in with body text and part of the word-soup that streams through a user's earbuds.
<Title> will be very useful — WHEN screen reader software is programmed to recognize and announce it to users.
We'll keep testing with the 2 main screen readers, JAWS and NVDA, and let our subscribers and clients know when the <Title> tag is ready to use.
But until then, keep using <H1> for the titles of your PDF documents until you hear from us.
<Artifact> Tag
This is a hairbrained idea from the PDF/UA standards committee.
Traditionally, artifacting unimportant elements (like borders, underlines, and unnecessary graphics) is done by putting an artifact attribute on a tag. Assistive technologies recognize the attribute and skip voicing or presenting it to their users. Remediators also don't see the element's tag in the PDF's tag tree, either.
But this new <Artifact> Tag creates an entirely different experience that is a nightmare for both screen reader users and remediators.
- It's not yet recognized by most assistive technologies so at this time, the content is discovered (rather than hidden) and voiced by screen readers. Example: the 4 borders on a table cell could now be announced as "PathPathPathPath" on each cell. Gah!!!
- For remediators and accessibility checkers, it will add countless useless <Artifact> tags to the tag tree, making it much more difficult to check and remediate PDFs. Each and every border fragment on the cells of a multi-page table will now have the <Artifact> tag. 100s of useless tags cluttering the tag tree. Gah!!!!!!!
The reasons the PDF committee has given for adding the <Artifact> tag are not valid enough to warrent making a more complex, cluttered tag tree, especially for elements that are visual "fluff" and don't convey valuable visible information. The committee's reasons could have been accomplished with other tags, attributes, or structure elements.
We don't believe these tags were vetted and tested thoroughly enough before being built into the new standard.
To correct PDFs that have <Artifact> tags, rename the tags either <P> or <Figure> and artifact them with the traditional method:
- Select the tag's yellow content container.
- Right-click on the yellow container.
- Select Change Tag to Artifact (this will add the traditional artifact attribute to the content and not change the tag's name back to Artifact).
- Delete the remaining empty tag.
What to Expect
Hopefully, assistive technologies, especially screen readers, will tweak their software to recognize these new tags and process them correctly for their end users.
But without a crystal ball, we don't have any idea if or when that will happen. The companies have a history of lagging behind in making their tools work better with PDF files.
So don't hold your breath for them to change, and I sure hope we're wrong about the timeline!
We'll keep you posted on this development.
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