tracker issue : CF-3734792

Problem Description:
The US Federal Government requires that any PDF that will be posted on a government website must be an accessible document, according to Section 508 guidelines. For most agencies, this means the document must be able to pass Adobe's own accessibility check, which is part of the Adobe Acrobat tools. Many authoring tools will automatically tag PDFs they create with proper structure (headings, paragraphs, tables) and meta-data (alt text from images, etc.). Certainly, that should be an easy thing to do when generating from well-formed HTML. Unfortunately, the PDF engine in CF11 and all prior versions produce documents with no tags and retain no meta-data from the source. As a result, there is an enormous amount of manual tweaking of the files that has to happen before they can be posted on a government website. This removes a lot of the value of being able to produce PDFs on the fly for government customers and, in many cases, producing the PDF from other offline tools (like Microsoft Office) ends up being the better option.
Steps to Reproduce:
1. Produce a PDF using any version of ColdFusion
2. Run the PDF through Adobe Acrobat accessibility checker
3. View the resulting accessibility report and recommendations
Actual Result:
All PDFs created by ColdFusion are not tagged and not accessible

Expected Result:
The PDF creation engine should retain structure and meta-data from the source and create a tagged document with that information.

Any Workarounds:
Only workarounds are to manually add the tags and structure to the document using Adobe Acrobat tools. If you don't have a full install of Adobe Acrobat, there are no workarounds that I know of.

----------------------------- Additional Watson Details -----------------------------

Watson Bug ID:	3734792

External Customer Info:
External Company:  
External Customer Name: jeff.c
External Customer Email:  
External Test Config: My Hardware and Environment details:

ColdFusion 10 and ColdFusion 11 Splendor on Microsoft Windows 7, installed as standalone server.

Attachments:

1. April 02, 2014 00:00:00: 1_PDFtest-AccessibilityReport.pdf

Comments: