speedata Publisher and accessibility

Version 4.19.8 has a completely written module for creating tagged PDF for accessibility.

First, you need to set the output format to PDF/UA with

<PDFOptions format="PDF/UA" />

Tagged PDF also needs an outline of the structure of the document. See the previous blog entry for more details on tagged PDF. To summarize: you create an description of what is visible in the PDF. Each visible part gets tagged with a structure type (“this is a label for a table of contents link”, “this is a heading” and so on).

The new command <StructureElement> in the speedata Publisher adds an entry to a hierarchical list. For example

<StructureElement role="Document">
	<StructureElement role="Sect">
		<StructureElement role="Art" />
		<StructureElement role="Art" />
	</StructureElement>
	<StructureElement role="Sect">
		<StructureElement role="Art" />
		<StructureElement role="Art" />
	</StructureElement>
</StructureElement>

creates two sections in document, each section contains two articles. To add text or images to a structure part, you need to create a unique id for entry, for example:

<StructureElement role="Document">
	<StructureElement role="Sect">
		<StructureElement role="Art" id="s1a1" />
		<StructureElement role="Art" id="s1a2" />
	</StructureElement>
	<StructureElement role="Sect">
		<StructureElement role="Art" id="s2a1"  />
		<StructureElement role="Art" id="s2a2"  />
	</StructureElement>
</StructureElement>

and add contents to the structure, for example:

<PlaceObject>
	<Textblock>
		<Paragraph role="H1" parent="s1a1">
			<Value>A short story</Value>
		</Paragraph>
		<Paragraph role="P" parent="s1a1">
			<Value select="sd:dummytext()" />
		</Paragraph>
	</Textblock>
</PlaceObject>

This adds a level 1 heading and a paragraph to the first article in the first section (id s1a1).

The document has the following outline:

Dynamic structure elements.

Depending on the data, you may not be able to predict the structure elements. Therefore you can add a child entry to a parent when you pass a parent id:

<StructureElement role="Document" id="doc" />

<StructureElement role="Sect" id="s1" parent="doc" />
<StructureElement role="Sect" id="s2" parent="doc" />

<StructureElement role="Art" id="s1a1" parent="s1" />
<StructureElement role="Art" id="s1a2" parent="s1" />
<StructureElement role="Art" id="s2a1" parent="s2" />
<StructureElement role="Art" id="s2a2" parent="s2" />

This is equivalent to the example at the beginning.

Defaults

The speedata Publisher starts with a default root element:

<StructureElement role="Document" id="doc" />

and the default parent of each element that is placed in the PDF is doc, so each element is a direct child of the document, unless you provide a different structure.