Accessibility issues with "Save to PDF" pages/documents

[Lucie McGee]

Hi Chromium team,

I belong to a group that publishes large (200+ page) guidelines documents in PDF format, which are used daily by various partners/vendors in 80 countries worldwide. Many of our vendors rely on screen readers or other accessibility tools to navigate these PDF files.

We recently migrated our guidelines from MS Word to Google Docs, and as a result noticed that the exported PDF files no longer include taggings for accessibility, such as lists, heading styles, alt-text, and so on. It seems this issue has been reported by others too, and is not specific to Google Docs - e.g.

• https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=607777
  
• https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=342891
  

For background on how MS Word supports accessibility tagging in PDFs, the "Exporting to MS Word and PDF" section of this page explains a bit more:

http://www.ssbbartgroup.com/blog/google-docs-accessibility-and-exportimport-options/

Any chance these accessibility issues might be improved in a future release? I'd also be grateful for any guidance or workarounds others might be able to recommend in the meantime.

Thanks very much,

Lucie

[PhistucK]

I am not sure this is related to Chromium, though. You use the export function of Google Docs, not of Chromium, right?

You should probably file a Google Docs issue instead?

The issues you mentioned apply to the save-to-PDF option in the printing dialog, unrelated to Google Docs.

☆PhistucK

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[Lucie McGee]

Yeah, I thought this was a Google Docs issue too, and I started by filing a bug against the Docs team in charge of file exports.

They responded that the issue is beyond the scope of Docs though, since the Chromium browser doesn't print these taggings (e.g., when you try to "Print > Save as PDF" for any web page in Chrome). It's hard for Docs to save/print stuff that Chrome itself cannot print.

In case it helps - while researching I found these Chromium reports from others, which seem to be describing the same core issue:

1. "save as PDF" doesn't generate a 508 compliance PDF (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=607777)
2. Print to PDF does not include alt text in the generated PDF (https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=342891)
   

Thanks,

Lucie

--

Lucie McGee |||| Program Manager |||| luc...@google.com

[PhistucK]

You mentioned those issues in the first post.

I still do not see the relation between Chrome and Google Docs. Perhaps they are using the same underlying software (Skia) for creating the PDF? If so, this sounds like a Skia issue, which you can file at crbug.com/skia.

(My guess is that even once Skia implements accessibility tags, the other side - Chromium and Google Docs - will have to supply this new information to Skia, but I do not really know)

Though if you feel this is important, you should probably escalate the issue using internal means (I am not a Googler, so I am not sure how)...

☆PhistucK