Open Bug 1657973 Opened 4 years ago Updated 28 days ago

Support generation of tagged (accessible) PDFs

Categories

(Core :: Printing: Output, enhancement, P3)

enhancement

Tracking

()

Accessibility Severity s2

People

(Reporter: svoisen, Unassigned)

References

Details

(Keywords: access, Whiteboard: [print2020])

When saving a document as PDF, either via "Save as PDF" or through the print user interface, we currently don't support the generation of tagged PDFs which contain the metadata necessary for screen reader use.

Keywords: access
Priority: -- → P3
Whiteboard: [print2020]
See Also: → tagged-pdf
Accessibility Severity: --- → s2

:jfkthame, could you have a look on this bug please ?

Flags: needinfo?(jfkthame)

We generate the PDF output via cairo, and cairo in principle has APIs for generating the tagged-pdf annotations (cairo_tag_begin, cairo_tag_end) that would describe document structure. (See https://www.cairographics.org/manual/cairo-Tags-and-Links.html#doc-struct) However, at the point where we're generating the PDF, we're quite far removed from the DOM structure, and dealing instead with a display list created from the frame tree. Doing a good job of tagged PDF generation looks like a pretty big and complex task... even more so given that there's no guarantee that the original HTML document was itself well structured.

So while I think this would be a great feature, I don't think implementing it is currently on anyone's radar, and it'd be a major undertaking if we do ever tackle it.

Flags: needinfo?(jfkthame)
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