Enable creation of accessible 'tagged' PDFs

[michaelrsweet]

Version: 2.0-feature
Original reporter:

Hi!
Thank you very much for your great software! I really do love it! However some important feature is missing for me: it's the ability to create tagged and thus accessible PDFs, i.e. important html tags like alt-tags, language chances, THead/TBody/TFoot etc. should also move into the pdf files. This feature might be important for you since accessibility of PDFs is a growing area of interest, especially for governmental organizations and also business organizations. Please have a look at http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/accessibility/pdfs/acro7_pg_ue.pdf for some information on that. I don't think that we should leave this field completely to Adobe. I would be very happy and appreciate it very much if at least some important basic features for tagged, accessible PDFs would move into HTMLDOC V2 which allow to access HTMLDOC-PDFs by screenreaders. The sooner the better since at the moment there is no other software than Acrobat to create accessible PDFs which only works on the client-side. Some server-side implemenation of PDF creation is missing and is urgently needed! So this feature would be some unique selling proposition for HTMLDOC. Maybe you can give some short feedback on that topic such as how complicated it is to implement, some possible roadmape for the integration etc.
Thanks and all the best to you!
Oliver

[vestmon]

One 1.9.x fix that would allow accessibility compliance for most text-only documents would be generating a /Lang pdf element to set the natural language. It could be set to the system default language, set with a command-line flag, or the lang attribute on the html tag, if present. While support for embedded language blocks and images would provide a greater challenge, this minor change would greatly improve access to htmldoc generated pdf documents for users who rely on screen reading software.