Accessibility
What seems to be old hat, we are focusing on in particular because we can see from our many years of practical experience with accessible production that there is still potential for optimization in numerous areas - starting with the programs and tools used, through greater awareness of the topic among our customers, to issues that are not covered by the current standards.
Background
With the ratification of EU Directive 2016/2102 on the accessibility of the websites and mobile applications of public bodies, they have been obliged to make files provided in PDF format accessible since September 2018. What exactly this means in relation to the PDF format remains vague, as the requirements stated in the laws and regulations are formulated in very general terms and reference is also made to “the state of the art”. The only specific reference to accessible PDFs can be found at the Bundesfachstelle für Barrierefreiheit, which is cited in the BITV 2.0 applicable in Germany as a “monitoring body in accordance with Section 13 (3) of the Disability Equality Act”. It writes about the requirements: “The state of the art should be, for example, ISO standard 14289-1:2014-12 for the accessible design of PDF files (PDF/UA standard).”
Status quo
As a rule, PDF/UA is also the standard to which requests for accessible PDFs refer. An error-free test report from the PAC 3 checker often serves as the central criterion for proving accessibility. However, as not all PDF/UA criteria can be checked automatically, it is obvious that this is far from sufficient to meet accessibility requirements. Even the provision of truly meaningful alternative texts for images, which is actually a task for publishers and authors or a service to be commissioned, is not always guaranteed. Questions regarding meaningful alternative representations for complex formulas or the optimal mapping of the semantic structure to the PDF tag structure also generally remain completely unanswered. These are just a few qualitative aspects that should be given more attention in the future.
Our goal - extended quality criteria for accessible publications
This is where we started, on the one hand to standardize and expand our internal processes, but also to make our customers aware of the potential for optimizing their products. As a result, we have established our internal quality and testing standard, which is closely aligned with the Matterhorn protocol and expands and concretizes its specifications. It lists the individual quality criteria and the method of testing them and can be stored in the form of a PDF form as a test report for each document produced. The result is an extensive but clear checklist. This quality standard is individually customizable and can therefore also take into account the quality criteria of individual customers or specific products.
In addition, documentation was created that contains our rules for mapping certain content structures to the PDF tag tree. These rules will be successively expanded for newly added content structures. At the same time, we have created a sample book as an accessible PDF in which these structures are implemented in practice. We invite technically interested parties and all users to also use it as a guide and to enter into an exchange with us in order to further optimize the result.
Production of accessible publications: Until now, a lot of manual work has been required
The current typesetting systems, however, are not able to create a technically correct PDF/UA document, even if the content is properly marked up. This has so far been a major obstacle to the creation of accessible PDFs, as subsequent interventions are often required to meet the standard. In addition to the standardization of quality requirements, the question therefore arose as to how we can technically improve the processes for creating PDF/UA documents in order to reduce the effort of manual reworking.
So far, we have used Adobe InDesign to produce accessible PDFs. Although support for creating accessible PDFs improves with each version, more or less rework is still required to create PDF/UA-compliant data. For example, it is easy to fix the fact that deco objects are not tagged as artifacts. It becomes more complicated if the bounding box for elements that span several pages is not correct or if table IDs are not set at all or are set incorrectly.
In addition to Adobe InDesign, we also use TeX/LaTeX as a typesetting system. TeX does not natively support the creation of accessible PDFs. Problems include the Unicode mapping of the fonts used, real spaces, which are required for accessibility, as well as missing commands for creating the structural elements, for storing alternative texts or for creating additionally required extra objects in the PDF (ParentTree, StructTreeRoot).
New Workflow for Accessibility at le-tex
Axel Strübing from le-tex has been dealing with the problems and possible solutions for a long time and presented an interim status at the 2012 conference of DANTE e. V. (German-speaking user association TeX e. V.). (Deutschsprachige Anwendervereinigung TeX e. V.) in 2012 and presented an interim status. In the meantime, we have developed his approach to production maturity for our customer Deutsches Institut für Normung e. V. (German Institute for Standardization). (DIN) into a revised workflow. This is currently in the test phase and the results are promising. Thanks to this new workflow, we can ensure that the standards created in PDF format meet all technical requirements in accordance with the PDF/UA standard without any reworking.
We are currently developing this implementation, which is specifically tailored to our customer DIN, into a standard workflow for the production of accessible PDFs for books and magazines.
Our aim is to make the creation of accessible PDFs more effective and significantly reduce the costs involved. For our larger publishing customers in particular, who generally work with structured data for their content anyway, we see the potential to create accessible PDFs with a manageable amount of additional effort and the need to address this issue, as EU Directive 2019/882 requires publishers to make their electronic publications accessible from 2025. Finally, smaller publishers and other potentially interested parties can also benefit from our expertise. We are already investing in solutions and establishing an efficient workflow to make your publications fit for the future.
DIN has been working very successfully with le-tex for a long time in the development of conversion solutions for generating XML data. In recent years, the collaboration has expanded to include the creation of accessible PDF documents. We are particularly proud of the generation of standard documents from XML sources in the NISO STS data format. Thanks to le-tex's expertise, this combines fully automated pagination with the generation of a standard-compliant PDF/UA document.
