32 Generate Accessible PDF Output

An accessible PDF output is a structured document that includes a document title and the PDF tags. The paragraph, link, image, table, and list elements are tagged in accessible PDF documents.

Prerequisites

Set the property for generating accessible PDF output at the report-level for specific reports or at the global level for all PDF outputs. See Configure Accessible PDF Output for Reports.

Requirements and Limitations

Element	Requirements	Limitations
Text	Format the text using heading styles such as heading1, heading2, and heading3.	Don’t justify text because screen readers might not correctly find the spaces between words when the line is justified.
Table	Tables must have headers. The PDF/UA standard recommends adding the headers. Adobe Acrobat reports a table without header as an error. If you add a table summary, the summary will be added as a table attribute in PDF documents. However, the PDF/UA format doesn't require a summary.	Don’t use a table for layout purpose. Whether a table is used as a data table or as a layout table, all tables are tagged as tables. Don’t use colspan or rowspan. The PDF/UA format allows spans, but Acrobat reports tables with spans as an error (irregular table).
Image	Add alternate text to every image.	NA
Document	Create bookmarks when you expect the output to contain more than 21 pages. The PDF/UA format doesn't require bookmarks, but Acrobat reports a large document without bookmarks as an error. Add the document title. You can add a title in the template, or you can set the title using the pdf-document-title runtime parameter.	NA
Header and footer	Use headers and footers only for providing the pagination information.	Don’t include any information apart from the page numbers in the header/footer section. The headers and footers are marked as "Artifacts" and these artifacts aren't read by the screen readers as per the ISO 14289 7.4 standard.
Static content	NA	Don’t include a table, list, or link element in the static content. The entire static content area will be tagged as a single paragraph.
Graphics	NA	Don’t use the Word Shape feature of RTF in the RTF template. Some of the Word Shape objects marked as artifacts instead of figures can’t be read by the screen readers.
Font	Map the Symbol font to a TrueType font to avoid the usage of the Adobe core symbol font in the output.	Don’t use the Dingbat font because there's no equivalent TrueType font. The Adobe accessibility checker displays a warning message when you use fonts that don't have encoding parameters.

PDF/UA-1 (ISO 14289-1:2014) is a standard for universal accessibility. The PDF/UA format requires all the fonts used in the output to be embedded in the document. Hence, the PDF/UA formatted report output might look different from the original report and the file size of the PDF/UA formatted output might be more than the original report.

If you select PDF/UA as the output format or if you change the Use PDF/UA format for accessible PDF output runtime property to true, and generate PDF in accessible mode, the look and feel of the report output might be different from the PDF output from the same template, because the PDF standard fonts such as Helvetica, Courier, and Times available with PDF viewers aren't used. Publisher doesn’t load the Type1 font for PDF/UA, PDF/A, and PDF/X.