Accessibility Bug: Footnotes not tagging properly in Word-converted PDFs
There is a bug in the Word to PDF conversion process that is causing footnotes to not tag properly. The footnote text is recognized under the <Note> tag, but the link to the footnote within the text is missing. This issue comes up when using the "Save as..." PDF option. The footnote tags appear correctly when converting using the Adobe Acrobat "Create PDF" add-on in Word. This issue occurs with both Mac and Windows computers.
Abby Harris
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Susan
commented
Hello, Mac Acrobat Pro 2020 (ver 2020.005.30562) user. I am having this same problem in 2022. Is there a fix? I can't find a way to tag the Note number. Very frustrating. I've tried converting from Word using the plug-in, save as, and print. Tagging a footnote won't work on any of the conversion methods.
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Abby Harris
commented
There is an accessibility tagging issue with the Acrobat Word add-on that gives you the "Create PDF" button in Word. The resulting converted PDF does not automatically add the "link-OBJR" tags that should be included under the <Link> tags for hyperlinks. When this happens, we have to manually add those back in using "Find..." and selecting "Unmarked Annotations." When you have a document with many links (I just worked with one that had over 250, for example) this process takes way too long and every other method of Word to PDF conversion adds the link-OBJR tags correctly.
This issue is only affecting Word for Mac (my coworker converted the same document using Word on her Windows PC and the link-OBJR tags showed up fine). It is also only an issue with the Adobe Acrobat add-on; the link-OBJR tags show up fine when using the "Save as..." option and selecting PDF.