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Form Fields not tagged when exported to PDF

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    • April 22, 2022 at 1:48 pm #14364841
      Ian Freeman-Lee
      Participant

      Hey there, I’ve just spent quite a bit of time researching this and haven’t found an answer, crossing my fingers someone here has an idea.

      The project: A set of PDF forms. They need to be interactive and pass the accessibility checker in Acrobat.

      I have a decent amount of experience creating accessible PDFs, and interactive PDFs, but not both combined, and this project has presented a number of new issues I’m not sure how to solve. The main one I’m wrestling with right now is that all of my form fields are apparently untagged once I run the accessibility checker in Acrobat.

      I tried adding the <Form> tag manually in the tags panel in InDesign, but when I do this it tells me that “The frame or frame content is not taggable”. My text fields were created as empty frame objects, and then turned into text fields in the buttons and forms panel. They have no extra visual elements of any kind.

      Has anyone else experienced this, and do you know a workaround in InDesign? I know they could be manually tagged in Acrobat, but that’s what I’m trying to avoid by doing this in InDesign.

      Thanks.

    • April 22, 2022 at 2:20 pm #14364842
      Ian Freeman-Lee
      Participant

      I found the problem! I’m just leaving this here for anyone else with the same issue who stumbles on this:

      I managed to create a text field that WOULD let me tag it by creating a text box instead of a frame. When I exported, though, the error was still there.

      Despite the deceptively worded error in the accessibility checker, the actual issue is that your form field is not in the articles panel. One nice thing is that this even exports correctly if you anchor the form field to other text in your document, which helps to maintain a sensible reading and tab order for complex forms like mine.

    • April 23, 2022 at 9:28 am #14364848
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Thank you for the update, Ian!

    • April 23, 2022 at 11:07 am #14364849
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Actually, Ian, I just checked with Dax Castro and Chad Chelius (see https://accessibilitychecklists.com) and they pointed out that that Tags panel in InDesign actually doesn’t have anything to do with accessibility tags. Unfortunate similar naming!

      You might want to check out Chad’s awesome article on a11y in this issue:

      Issue 130: Accessible PDF

    • April 25, 2022 at 9:24 am #14364855
      Ian Freeman-Lee
      Participant

      Great to know, thanks for the follow up!

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