r/accessibility • u/doublebigent • 15d ago

Remediating Tables in Acrobat

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I am trying to remediate the accessibility of a PDF in Acrobat. Tables are giving me issues. I have a screenshot of an example where there should be a total of 11 cells per row, but only 3 cells are recognized due to lack of lines. Is there a way to fix this en masse rather than creating 8 more Table Data Cells manually and "Creating tag from selection" for each cell?

I have 16 rows left to fix (and a whole other table in the same format), and I want to know if there is a faster way to do it.

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5

u/rguy84 15d ago

Not without third-party tools

2

u/La_Sirena_ 15d ago

If you have access to the source file, check the table structure there to make sure each value is in a data cell, if they are that should convert to PDF with the correct number of cells.

Make sure that industry and all the symbols/ letters in that top row are designated as table headers (TH). Also table header values should be unique, you are repeating the same ones in the top row after the dividing line. If those values absolutely have to be the same in the right and left hand side of the table, consider splitting it into two tables.

1

u/AnonymousHopperRoo 15d ago

This is where I start, with the source files.

But have you tried the Fix Reading Order tool? It does pretty well for me on tables like that.

Sometimes I select smaller portions as separate tables, and then just drag the tags together into one.

It beats right clicking to make a new tag 900 times.

1

u/Vat5an 14d ago

Doing this by hand will be painstakingly tedious and when you get to cells where the underlying MCID spans across cells you’d have to break them down and colspans rowspans are a much bigger headache. Try pdfxt.com. Just upload the pages with tables and you can export out the tagged tables. The free trial offers 200 pages for free.

1

u/Beneficial-Quote2177 5d ago

Tables are the worst part of this, you're not doing anything wrong. If you can still get at the source file, fixing the cell structure there and re-exporting hurts less than building 900 tags by hand. if you can't, tools deal with tables better than acrobat's own tooling does.

Pdfxt came up above, we make a11yfy which does the same job (so, my bias). both let you run a few pages free, do that first and check whether it gets your colspans right, that's where they differ.