Karlen Communications
Document Remediation/Repair Service

I remediate Word, and PowerPoint content to be more accessible using Office 2016. I also remediate Excel content to include hidden instructions for those using screen reading or Text-to-Speech tools as well as adding hidden links to main topic areas of a worksheet.

I create accessible PDF forms. Toward that goal, I consult with clients to ensure that their Word documents used as the form template is accessible.

The following tutorials are comparing the currently available PDF creation and remediation tools: Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, Foxit Phantom for Business and Nuance PowerPDF Advanced.

2022 update: We are still facing crappy tagging using conversion tools. The <Span> tag is still sprinkled throughout the tags for no good reason. I see <P> tags nested in <P> tags (a clear violation of PDF/UA - 1), and the Table of Contents tagging has been broken since at least October 2018.

Foxit is now Foxit PDF Editor 11 and still is not as good as Adobe Acrobat Pro. Nuance sold its imaging software, including PowerPDF, to Kofax. Kofax PowerPDF tags everything as either a <P> or a <Figure>. I haven’t tested it with a document that has a table, but I am not holding out much hope. This is a huge step backward for PowerPDF.

The Microsoft ability to save as a tagged PDF (from an accessible document or presentation) has fixed the issue of “tagging” the gridlines of tables but is now tagging any underline or text borders of a correctly created style. Sigh. They continue to fluctuate between tagging the Title style in Word as an H1 which it should be, and a paragraph.

Randomly, all PDF tools are adding a <Artifact> tag, which does not exist in PDF/UA – 1. This means that we have to try and artifact and artifact; however because it is an <Artifact>. Tag, we can’t artifact it most of the time. Sigh.

So while we continue to educate people on how to create accessible digital content, we are now faced with “good document in…garbage out.”.

If you want access to my test files as attachments to these documents, you need to purchase the book Accessible and Usable PDF Documents: Techniques for Document Authors, Fourth Edition from the Karen McCall School on Teachable. These are the documents without the test files.

Scanned/OCR Documents using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, Foxit Phantom for Business and Nuance PowerPDF Advanced.

Tables of Content using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, Foxit Phantom for Business and Nuance PowerPDF Advanced.

Contact Karlen Communications for a quote if you are interested in document remediation or training!

I’ve been providing document remediation/repair services to optimize digital content to be accessible for those of us with disabilities for over 17 years.