Export to PDF - Section 508 Accessibility Compliance

[Former Member]

I have a .Net program that includes several Crystal Reports. The program uses Crystal to generate a report and then immediately export it to a PDF format which is saved and used through out the company. Recently we've been doing checks and it was discovered that these PDFs are not compliant with [Section 508|http://www.section508.gov/|section508.gov]

The two main issues discovered in the check were:

This document is not [tagged|http://www.acrobatusers.com/tutorials/what-are-pdf-tags-and-why-should-i-care|what are PDF tags and why should I care]; the reading order of the contents may be incorrect

None of the images in this document that need alternate text have it

Are there settings or properties that can be set in the Crystal Report document that would solve these issues when exporting the document to a PDF? If not, is there a thrid party component I could use to solve these issues? I already use [PDFSharp|http://pdfsharp.com/PDFsharp/|pdfsharp.com] to merge PDFs with different orientations (landscape/portriat) and to add security and set document properties like Title, Author, Description, etc. But am unable to figure out how to add tagging or alternate text on images at that point.

If anyone has any advice on the subject I would greatly appreciate it.

[vinaycrystalreports]

Any updates on this? I am also facing issue while exporting crystal report to pdf ,the exported pdf is not accessible.

The exported pdf does not contains any tags

If anyone has any advice on the subject I would greatly appreciate it.

[former_member183750 · Accepted solution]

What version of Crystal reports?

What updates have you applied to CR?

What version of .NET?

Ludek

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[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I'm using Visual Studio 2008 and target .Net 3.5.

I use the Crystal Reports Basic for Visual Studio 2008 to make the reports. Haven't done any updates to it.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Would a different version of Crystal have something that would help for adding tagging when converting to a PDF?

[former_member583013 · Accepted solution]

Hi,

There are no releases of CR.NET that allow for tagging of the content in the manner that you are seeking. Please give me a few days to investigate your available options and I will update this thread.

Regards,

Coy

Product Manager - Enterprise Reporting

[former_member583013 · Accepted solution]

Quick clarifying question: When you ask about a potential third party tool to tag documents, are you looking for something that will automatically generate tags or allow you to manually set them? I would assume that you would want to manually set them as automatic tagging isn't the best for creating Section 508 compliant reports.

Acrobat Pro has tagging capabilities on PDFs that were created using other applications. You can read about it in the following document. This was based on Acrobat Pro 6; however, the same principles should apply.

[http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/accessibility/pdfs/acro6_pg_ue.pdf|http://www.adobe.com/enterprise/accessibility/pdfs/acro6_pg_ue.pdf]

I am continuing to research your options and will get back to this thread shortly.

Coy

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I had a feeling that using a third party to automatically do the tagging probably wouldn't work very well (especially with the crazy complicated reports we were asked to create), but yes automatic is what I was looking for. My project created 65,851 PDF documents last year...so doing them each by hand is not a feasible solution for us. I was imagining that crystal would/could/should have just a spot on each object where you can specifiy the tag if that section or object is not suppressed. But I guess that was wishful thinking. I really do not have a lot of knowledge in tagging or even in Section 508 compliance, so the information that you posted is very helpful. Thank you for looking into it for me and please let me know if you find any other possible solution or if you hear if Crystal Reports has any plans to include this type of thing anytime in the future.

Thanks again.

[former_member583013 · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, the tagging options that you are looking for are not available in CR. I do think that it is worthwhile to consider for a future version and will be sure to include it in my thinking as we start planning new releases.

Depending on what you are doing with you reports, you may want to look at deploying the Crystal Reports webForm viewer as this may give you better Section 508 Compliance; however, if PDF is a core requirement, then this will not help you.

Coy

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

I am looking for exactly same solution, want to know if tagging is doable in crysatl reports itself so once its exported to PDF, it will be mostly 508 compliant, also if anyone knows, Does crystal come up with 508 compliance support yet?

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

We have to publish notices every night which are currently auto-generated PDF files. We are now required to make them 508 compliant. Is there any update on whether/when this will be possible through CR? If not, does anyone know of any 3rd party apps to accomplish this (must be automated; making the changes manually is not feasible for us). We are currently using XML files as a feed for the PDFs. Thanks for the info!

[Former Member]

Any updates on this? I am also facing issue while exporting crystal report to pdf which should be 508 compliant. Is tagging of PDF document now possible with recent releases of crystal report? Setting ReportDocument.Summary Info's Author, Subject properties also do not work. Please help.

[ido_millet]

Please avoid cross listing.
At least one of the rd-party Crystal Reports desktop schedulers listed athttp://kenhamady.com/bookmarks.html provides that functionality. It allows you to automate the process of exporting the rpt to a PDF and assigning document properties based on the Crystal rpt summary info or (by default) or based on specified values.

It also allows you to automate exporting yo MS Word and converting that document to a tagged PDF.