Adobe Acrobat XI - Manual (Page 475)

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Accessibility, tags, and reflow
Last updated 1/14/2015
Correct table tags with the Tags panel
Use the Touch Up Reading Order tool to make sure that tables are tagged correctly. If you need to structure figures and
text within the cells of your table, you may prefer to re-create the table in the authoring application before you convert
it as an accessible PDF. Adding tags on a cell level in Acrobat is a labor-intensive procedure.
Before you make any changes to table elements, use the Touch Up Reading Order tool to determine that the table is
tagged correctly.
Check table elements
1 In the Tags panel, expand the tags root to view a table tag.
2 Select the table tag <Table> and verify that it contains one of the following elements:
• Table Rows, each of which contains Table Header <TH> or Table Data<TD> cells.
• <THead>, <TBody>, and <TFoot> sections, each of which containsTable Rows. (The Table Rows contain <TH>
cells, <TD> cells, or both.)
3 Do one or more of the following:
• If the tag for the table doesn’t contain these elements, but rows, columns, and cells appear in the table in the
document pane, use the Touch Up Reading Order tool to select and define the table or individual cells.
• If the table contains rows that span two or more columns, set ColSpan and RowSpan attributes for these rows in
the tag structure.
• Re-create the table in the authoring application, and then convert it to a tagged PDF.
Set ColSpan and RowSpan attributes
1 In the Tags panel, select a <TD> or <TH> element.
2 Choose Properties from the options menu.
3 In the Touch Up Properties dialog box, click the Tag panel, and then click Edit Attribute Objects.
4 Select Attribute Objects, and then click New Item to create a new Attribute Object Dictionary.
5 Expand the new dictionary, select the Layout attribute, and then click Change Item.
6 Change the Layout value to Table.
7 Select the Attribute Object Dictionary, and click New Item.
8 In the Add Key And Value dialog box, type ColSpan or RowSpan in the Key box, enter the number of columns or
rows spanned in the Value box, choose Integer from the Value Type pop-up menu, and click OK.
Standard PDF tags
This section describes the standard tag types that apply to tagged PDFs. These standard tags provide assistive software
and devices with semantic and structural elements to use to interpret document structure and present content in a
useful manner.
The PDF tags architecture is extensible, so any PDF document can contain any tag set that an authoring application
decides to use. For example, a PDF can have XML tags that came in from an XML schema. Custom tags that you define
(such as tag names generated from paragraph styles of an authoring application) need a role map. The role map matches
each custom tag to a standard tag here. When assistive software encounters a custom tag, the software can check this
role map and properly interpret the tags. Tagging PDFs by using one of the methods described here generally produces
a correct role map for the document.