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Tagged accessible report for a procurement requirement (and it passed)

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I do a fair bit of work for orgs that have to meet accessibility requirements on anything they publish, and this one came with an explicit line in the contract about the PDF being properly tagged. Usually that means exporting from wherever, then a miserable cleanup pass in Acrobat fixing the tag tree by hand.

This time I built the report properly from the start, real headings, lists as actual lists, table headers with scope, alt text on the figures, and exported it tagged. Ran it through veraPDF and it came back clean, so the structure tree was actually right rather than something I had to repair. The image-heavy sections compressed down nicely on export too, so the final file isn't enormous despite all the charts.

Worth saying: the tool gets you a conformant file, but the human-judgement part, sensible reading order, alt text that actually says something, is still on you. Still, starting from a clean tag tree instead of fighting one is a completely different afternoon.

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Passing veraPDF on the first export instead of repairing the tag tree afterward is the dream. How granular did you have to get with the table headers, did marking the header row carry the scope through, or did you set it per cell?

13 rep

Marked the header row and set scope on it, and the cells below picked it up the way you'd want, didn't have to go cell by cell. The figures needed individual alt text obviously, but the structural part was mostly getting the headings and lists right in the first place. Do that and the tree comes out sensible on its own.