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Topic: RE: invisible text which is available to a screen reader (Via Email)
Conf: (P-PDF) PDF Accessibility, Msg: 129604
From: Duff_Johnson
Date: 3/18/2005 01:54 AM

> I have a pdf document with no tags. We want to add a small
> blurb on the front page that explains the document is 508
> compliant. This small blurb needs to be invisible. My
> original solution was to add a background to the first page,
> then tag the document.

Your thought is a good one - adding alt. text to a figure on page 1 is a
perfectly plausible way to interject Publisher's Notes text for
screen-readers only. It does NOT have to be a background... could be
any image (figure) on the 1st page.

> When I do this, the add tags command
> thinks that every page in the document is a figure and tags
> it as such. If I tag the document w/o the background added to
> the first page it works fine. Once the document is tagged I
> can add the background and create a tag for it. The reason
> this won't work is that we have hundreds of documents this
> needs to be done for. I was hoping to do it in a batch
> process. Does anyone have any ideas?

Tags are document-specific, and cannot be copied. Adding specific tags
as a batch process... this may well be possible, but not with the
Acrobat tools as they exist today.

I hope you weren't thinking that you can automate Section 508 compliance
assurance in PDF!

Since you'll be opening and verifying each of your files as compliant on
a document-by-document basis (right...?), you could simply add a
"generic" image, tag and alt. text to the first page of each PDF as part
of your verification and sign-off process.

A batch-able option, I suppose, would be to add your text as
background-colored text (usually white) to the top of page 1 of every
document...and THEN run the Make Accessible plugin against your files,
under the theory that it will "pick up" the "invisible" text and tag it
for you.

Duff Johnson
Document Solutions, Inc.
http://www.document-solutions.com