Fixing Tags

Fixing Tags

Nowadays, many documents are tagged incorrectly, which can lead to issues with the accessibility of the documents. When fixing a poorly tagged PDF, you can delete the tags and add them either automatically or manually, but even in this case, the created tags might not be 100% correct. PDFix allows you to fix the individual tags of your PDF by modifying or replacing them.

After loading your document, open the Tags panel in order to analyze the Tag tree. We also recommend running the Validation since the Validation errors can navigate you to the incorrect or missing tags and guide you in the process of fixing the PDF tag tree.

We will first take a look at fixing the individual validation errors that can occur due to incorrect tagging, and then we will examine the tag tree as a whole and find any other errors in the tags.

You can watch the linked video for a step-by-step explanation of the entire process.

Untagged document contents

In our document, the first validation error is connected to untagged document contents. This simply means that parts of our document are currently untagged. We can fix this error by manually adding tags to the content following our manual tagging tutorial.

The second option is to use the Fix Error button on one or multiple selected errors simultaneously. In the corresponding dialogue, you can choose to mark the content as Artifact or select the appropriate tag. That’s it! Revalidate your document to see the changes.

Untagged document contents
Marking the selected content as artifact.

Heading order

Next, we will examine the headings error. This error notes that the headings need to be used in a different order. The heading tags should be used in the proper order, starting with H1 and following with H2, H3,… In our tag tree, we can see that H3 is used prior to H2 and that our initial Heading is currently tagged as text.

We can fix this by deleting the corresponding tags and replacing them with new ones or by simply double-clicking on the incorrect tag and retagging it by selecting the proper tag from the drop-down selection.

Heading order
Incorrect heading order (left) with the corresponding error (right).

Incorrect list structure

The remaining validation errors in our PDF are present due to an incorrect structure of the lists. By examining the tag tree, we can learn that our first list has its tags split between a list and a paragraph. We can also see some additional errors present in the subtags of the list. You could fix all of these manually; however, with this many errors, we suggest deleting the incorrect tags and letting our automated tagging process generate the correct tag for you.

Incorrect list structure
Incorrectly tagged list with the corresponding errors (right).

Reading order

Fixing all validation errors does not necessarily guarantee a correctly tagged PDF. We recommend that you analyze the entire tag tree, ensuring that the reading order is correct (the tags are in the proper order). If this is not the case, drag and drop the incorrect tags in the tag tree to rearrange the order.

Reading order
An example of an incorrect reading order with the corresponding tags (left).

Lists and sublists

Take special care when analyzing the lists to ensure a correct structure. Our document has a list that is not properly separated into sublists. We can quickly fix this by deleting the incorrect tags corresponding to the sublist and replacing them. Tag each sublist as an individual list and simply move it into the body of the main list.

Lists and sublists
A list, that is not properly separated into sublists.


And that is it. In this post, we have demonstrated how you can fix some of your incorrect tags. If you need any additional help with tags concerning tables, read our next blog post and watch the corresponding video concerning this topic.