Re-Adding Accessibility Tags to a PDF You've Edited
When you make any edits to text within a tagged, accessible PDF, some of the accessibility tags get stripped, and the document becomes non-compliant. There's no easy way to prevent this, but when making a small change to your document (e.g. a deadline), the PREP tool can quickly fix the issue by importing the tags back from the previous version of the document.
Background: What is the PREP tool?
PREP is the new self-help PDF remediation tool licensed by the Stanford Office of Digital Accessibility. It is free, replaces Equidox, and is AI-based. Visit SODA for information about PREP and how to get started .
How to Import Tags in PREP
Important notes: This solution only works when you make relatively minor edits to your file, for example, changing a deadline. Larger changes will result in text moving up or down on the page, which will create errors when importing tags.
This solution also only works for text that is not connected to a form field. For example, this method works well when changing something in a text-only paragraph. It does not work when the text is associated with a checkbox, free text response area, or any other "fillable PDF" field.
After you've edited your PDF, follow these steps to add the correct tags back into the file:
Upload both the old and new versions into PREP. Be sure to check the box to "Load tagged PDF."
From the Dashboard, find the card for the NEW version of the PDF file. Click the 3-dot menu and choose "import tags" from the options.
A list of additional files from your PREP dashboard will be displayed. Choose the OLD version of your PDF and click submit.
A popup will appear asking you to confirm that you wish to override the existing tags. Select Yes.
Check your NEW PDF
Once you've imported the tags to your revised PDF, you'll want to confirm that everything looks correct.
Start by opening the new file in PREP. Scroll to the section that you edited. You should see boxes around all of the text - these are the accessibility tags. If any of your text is missing a box/tag, then the import did not work as expected.
Correctly Tagged Example
In this example, the tags imported correctly. You can see that all of the text and form fields have tag boxes around them.
Incorrectly Tagged Example
In this example, the academic year was changed, but the tags did not import correctly. As you can see, the first few lines of text do not contain any tags.
Extra Credit
You can also run the accessibility checker within the PREP tool to ensure all the tags function correctly. To do so, click the checkmark in the top right corner. You can choose to check a single page at a time ("page wise") or the entire document at once ("document wise").
A list of the checks that were performed will appear in the left column of the page. If there are any issues, these will show in red and will include additional information for correction.
Video Tutorial