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accessibility | tagged pdf support


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I do not work for or with Serif.

Could you please explain more of what you mean?

For example, if someone were producing a PDF (Portable Document Format) document using a future version of Affinity Publisher with that facility, what would he or she do to use such a feature, and what benefit would this add to the PDF document so as to benefit someone wanting to access the document please? Would the benefitted user usually have some form of visual impairment, or something like that?

Is this in any way related to PDF/A or is it something different please?

William

 

Until December 2022, using a Lenovo laptop running Windows 10 in England. From January 2023, using an HP laptop running Windows 11 in England.

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  • 2 months later...

Does anyone know if Affinity Publisher now has this option?

In the UK, there's a lot of mandated government requirements about producing accessible PDFs that naturally have accessible tagging as a base requirement;, and of course it is simply good practice.

I haven't spotted anything in the app and help as yet, but I'm hoping I've just overlooked something 🤷🏻‍♂️

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On 4/20/2020 at 7:42 PM, wonderings said:

PDF support in general is bad at the moment with Affinity apps. In time I trust they will get there but it seems nothing is being done at the moment. Another reason I would say stay with Adobe for jobs that pay.

What a Pity, I am quitte happy tou use Publisher. Tagged pdf and pdf bookmarks and it will be perfect

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  • 8 months later...

Bumping this thread again, as I was just about to start a new project in Publisher and then noticed that it also needs to be exported to an accessible/tagged PDF. In the interest of not having to do the job twice, I thought I'd do a quick search to be sure Publisher could handle this job, but appears that I've run into the limits of Publisher.

Serif, PLEASE ensure that Publisher is an actual option for modern publishing workflows and not a fancy, modern looking take on a 20+ year old set of app features. I guess it's back to InDesign or PrinceXML.

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Accessible files can be accessed, read, processed, and used by those with disabilities who must use assistive technologies with their computers: they include screen readers, magnification software, dyslexia software, and mobility software (when someone can't operate a keyboard or mouse).

Accessible ICT (Information Communications Technology, such as PDFs, EPUB, digital media, websites) is required by the governments of most industrialized countries; it is usually part of the country's civil rights and equal access to education legislation, such as the ADA in the US. See this world map for details: https://www.3playmedia.com/blog/countries-that-have-adopted-wcag-standards-map/  But note that many more countries are in the process of formally adopting the standards and are already producing accessible files.

The United Nations and other non-partisan international organizations promote accessibility because nearly 1/3 of the world's population has a disability or impairment that prevents them from reading and using digital content. See https://www.karlencommunications.com/DisabilityRights.html

Accessibility means any type of file that is available digitally, whether via a website or other type of media, must meet the accessibility requirements spelled out by the PDF/UA-1 standards (for PDFs), WCAG 2.1 (for websites), and EPUB 3 (for EPUBs).  From Affinity Publisher, it would apply to PDFs and EPUBs made from Publisher layouts.

The standards are international: individual countries pass the legislation that requires the various accessibility standards to ensure that no citizen is prevented from accessing and reading digital information, such as textbooks for school, financial and legal paperwork, user manuals, employment/school/work applications, news, libraries/research ... just about everything we all read and/or download from the web.

Graphic designers create the bulk of this type of content, and right now, only MS Word, Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress have tools to export tagged, accessible PDFs.

There's an opportunity for Affinity to add accessibility tools to Publisher and create a solid competitor to InDesign. I can't begin to count the number of designers who work for governments (national and local), academia (preschool through post-secondary), or for major industries that are required to have accessible ICT.  They're stuck with InDesign because it's the only viable tool right now.

They'd jump ship in a heartbeat if Affinity gave them accessibility tools in Publisher.

—Bevi Chagnon / PubCom.com

Trainer, consultant, and book author for accessible documents.
US Delegate to the ISO committee for the PDF/UA standards.
Advisor and beta tester to software companies for building accessibility tools.

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On 9/19/2021 at 6:49 AM, Dezinah said:

nearly 1/3 of the world's population has a disability or impairment that prevents them from reading and using digital content

Without looking into this, I would offer my strong doubts about that number. Extrapolating 1/3 to just the UK that would mean about 20 million people. I know that official figures reveal about a 99% literacy rate in the UK, and that means being able to read and write. Not everyone who is literate is a new Shakespeare, but they are also not all impaired to such an extent as your statement suggests. I frequently wear spectacles when I am reading a lot. Does that mean I am impaired? Maybe. Does it prevent me from reading reading digital content? Evidently not.

I support providing tagged PDFs if that will help people.

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On 9/18/2021 at 10:49 PM, Dezinah said:

...

—Bevi Chagnon / PubCom.com

Trainer, consultant, and book author for accessible documents.
US Delegate to the ISO committee for the PDF/UA standards.
Advisor and beta tester to software companies for building accessibility tools.

Welcome, Bevi.

Just as a note to Serif or anyone else, Bevi is truly a world-wide leading expert in the subject of accessible publications.

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On 2/4/2022 at 7:21 PM, shinebox said:

For now, I build PDFs in Publisher and then make them accessible with Acrobat DC Pro. Not ideal to say the least, but there's no way I'll go back to Indesign and Illustrator, so it is what it is. I'll just have to eat the monthly acrobact costs.

Hi shinebox, I'd like to hear more about this workflow, as I'm forced to do accessible files and I really don't want to touch Indesign. Can you actually do it just with Acrobat?

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Yes, you can make pretty much any PDF accessible with Adobe Acrobat Pro DC. But it's time-consuming, tedious, frustrating, and a royal PITA. See below for some software options.

It would be wonderful if Affinity would license an excellent plug-in by Axaio Software, Made To Tag at https://www.axaio.com/doku.php/en:products:madetotag. It puts an accessibility panel into the program and also converts it to PDF/UA-1 compliant PDFs.  Right now it's available for InDesign and QuarkXPress.

Although InDesign is an excellent program, it's overkill for basic graphic design documents. So many in our design community could benefit from Affinity Publisher having accessibility tools.

For now, those using Affinity Publisher would have to remediate the PDF with either software (Adobe Acrobat Pro DC or CommonLook PDF are my shop's 2 favorites) or hire an outside service to do it. Both take time and add costs to your project's budget. 

And there's a learning curve for accessibility. No tool has a magic wand that makes the PDF accessible. YOU have to learn how to judge if it did the job right, whether the correct tags were used for the content, and if the Alt-Text is appropriate for the graphics.

Disclaimer: I make my living by teaching designers, writing books and online tutorials, and consulting with companies on their accessibility products. I don't make anything from Adobe, Affinity, Microsoft, CommonLook, or any other company whose software was mentioned. I try to be as objective — and helpful — as possible.

—Bevi Chagnon

Designer | Teacher | Author | Expert for Accessible Documents
Learn about accessibility at our free blog, www.PubCom.com/blog

   

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10 hours ago, Dezinah said:

It would be wonderful if Affinity would license an excellent plug-in by

I can't find the name, but the PDF export feature in the Affinity line should be licensed from a German software house. I wonder if they already include something like the one you are suggesting, and therefore we can hope to see it implemented soon.

Paolo

 

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On 3/29/2022 at 7:05 AM, Dezinah said:

It would be wonderful if Affinity would license an excellent plug-in by Axaio Software, Made To Tag at https://www.axaio.com/doku.php/en:products:madetotag.

Have you seen the price of it? A single user licence for InDesign is €349. Even a bulk discount application-wide version would not be cheap. APub doesn't have a plugin system as yet. If and when it gets one users could decide for themselves if they want to spend several times the cost of APub on a plugin.

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On 2/4/2022 at 12:21 PM, shinebox said:

For now, I build PDFs in Publisher and then make them accessible with Acrobat DC Pro. Not ideal to say the least, but there's no way I'll go back to Indesign and Illustrator, so it is what it is. I'll just have to eat the monthly acrobact costs.

That is what we are doing at UUJEC; we have a subscription to Acrobat Pro through TechSoup, but it takes lots of time for our one part-time staff person to add accessibility.  Support for tagging would make this much easier!  Please, major request for version 2.0!

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I've been focusing on HTML and web-specific accessibility tree type things, but this year I attended CSUN conference and learned a bit more about PDF accessibility.

I'm trying to think through the steps that would be needed.

When creating documents, we already use paragraph styles. Those aren't necessarily semantic, however they aren't a big leap from tagging things. I'm laying out a pricing sheet in Publisher right now (which is fairly simple) - but as an example, if there was a panel like the paragraph styles panel - but with h1, h2, h3, h4 - (or however they do it in PDF land) - it would be quick to select the headings and assign them to their respective hierarchical tags. There could be a panel for "Assistive technology"  and it could be like the "appearance" panel / and contextual. Whatever was selected could have its options. An image could have alt text. A block of text could have optional headings. Given that there's a history panel - and we're able to record state and key: value pairs for just about everything - I'd be curious what the hold up is here. Is it a gap in the real-world reasoning for how it works? (as you can tell - I don't know either / on the actual PDF output side) (or the legal side) - But as someone who would use a screen-reader or braille reader to read a basic PDF document, that part seems like something we can illustrate to help move this forward.

As it stands, Publisher can't be used to create official (legal) digital documents for any company - unless you plan on sending them out for remediation.

par.jpg

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The tags and reading order would be created when the PDF is exported from the source design/layout program.

We "assign" tags in the layout, but they don't actually get created until the PDF is being exported.

Affinity already knows how to make a PDF because any software that creates any kind of PDF must follow the international standards for PDFs called ISO 32000. Any PDF must be made to the standard so that the PDF file can be read or viewed by any brand of PDF reader. This is very common in the manufacturing and software world. It's crucial in printing as we see with out PDF/X requirements (another international standard from the ISO for press-quality PDFs).

All Affinity has to do now is add the standards for PDF/UA ISO 14329, an extended version of the PDF standards that includes the requirements for accessibility in a PDF, such as tags and reading orders.

They've already built their programming engine to create general PDFs, now add in the accessibility requirements. I won't be rude and say it's easy for Affinity to do that, but it's not that complicated, either. The hardest part is making the fricking PDF itself to begin with, and they've already done that.

@sheriffderek, since you already know HTML and CSS, let me make a comparison that could help put this into perspective.

HTML requires that standard tags be used to encase all parts of the content, like <p>, <h1>, <h2>, etc.  You can't publish a webpage without having your content tagged.

Desktop publishing, on the other hand, has traditionally NOT required this type of tagging, unless you were specifically doing XML, SGML, or tagged content publishing. Tags and accessibility are relatively new to the graphic design industry.

In websites, CSS is what's used to style the content, instructing a browser to take all <p> content and use Source Sans font, for example. Or take all <h1> content and color it RBG ## ## ##. Web developers design with CSS.

CSS is directly like what we do now with our Affinity Publisher paragraph and character styles: we define how a particular portion of text will look, its font, color, alignment, size, etc. — just like CSS does in HTML.

At this point, Publisher doesn't let us designate what tag to put on each type of text. Styles are the most convenient way to do this, as Adobe InDesign has shown for the past decade. As a graphic designer, I need to make a style for my subheadings that specifies Roboto Bold, 24 pt on 26 pt leading, left aligned, no hyphenation — and also tag it as <h2> when the PDF is exported.

We don't put tags inside the desktop publishing layout— no accessibility tags are in the layout. Instead, we give the instructions to add the tags when the PDF is exported. (Note, this is NOT XML, which does tag the content in the layout. PDF Accessibility tags are not XML tags.)

So Affinity needs to expand their current PDF-export utility to include accessibility tags and reading order, and then give us a way to assign the tags and control the reading order in our layouts.

And as a bonus, they could port that utility over to Designer, giving us the ability to make accessible info graphics and small projects in that program, too.

If Affinity did that, eat your heart out Adobe!  😁  Illustrator doesn't have a shred of accessibility in it.

Imagine if we designers had both layout and graphics programs that could make accessible PDFs.

Wow. Game changer for the industry.

 

—Bevi Chagnon / PubCom.com

Designer | Teacher | Author | Expert for Accessible Documents
Learn about accessibility at our free blog, www.PubCom.com/blog

US Delegate to the ISO committee for the PDF/UA standards.
Advisor and beta tester to software companies for building accessibility tools.

 

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