pdf Exports Fail Acrobat Accessibility Checker - Table Headers and Tagged Content

[Joshua Hart-Steeds]

We need exported pdfs to pass acrobat's accessibility checks. The main issue we were having was with the header rows of tables not being recognised as TH [Table Header] but being identified as TD [Table Data] instead, when preparing for accessibility. I may have fixed this by clicking Table Options > Header Row/Column for each table, but if not, is there a line of code anyone can give me for this to stick in the pdf export settings?

The other issue is with "Tagged content" failing, not sure if anyone has any experience fixing this somehow?

[Barbara Szczesniak]

@Joshua Hart-Steeds Just a note that you need to log in once the Jira page opens so that you can vote for the issue. 

As this will not help you right now, I have 2 suggestions to try:

• Export to Word, make modifications to the content there (if needed), and create a PDF from the Word file
• Investigate the 3rd-party apps available in the Atlassian Marketplace to see if any of them produce accessible PDFs. Try this search for "PDF export" and Confluence: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/search?query=pdf+export&product=confluence 

[Joshua Hart-Steeds]

Thank you, Barbara. Yes, exporting to Word is the one sure way we can manage this, but it is more time consuming than I was hoping for.

Excellent, thank you, I'll have a look at the marketplace. I previously looked at 3rd party apps for advanced table settings but your suggestion might be a better way to go, so thank you!

Ideally, I hope Atlassian considers this issue in a future update, but your suggestions are very helpful, thank you.

[Dan Breyen]

Hi @Joshua Hart-Steeds I found CONFCLOUD-45682 on Atlassian's Jira Site regarding the creation of accessible documents.  I would suggest voting for and watching it for updates.

Feel free to comment on that work item as well and share how that is impacting your workflows.

[Joshua Hart-Steeds]

Thanks but I'm not optimistic about this one, the page was created 8 years ago, and the original page 10 years ago, and no longer even seems to be working properly, at least not for me, as I'm unable to vote for it. Not sure how many updates will be coming!

For more context and impetus, making my institution's pdfs accessible is a human rights issue, and we will soon have many to export, so a fix from the Confluence side would be the best option for us, and making them accessible after exporting them proves to be very time-consuming.