Ensuring that your PDF is properly tagged is crucial when creating an accessible document. PDFix allows you to manually add tags to your document and, therefore, ensure its compliance with accessibility standards.
After loading your document into PDFix, make sure to open the tags panel to view the tag tree and keep track of the tagging process.
PDFix offers various tools for selecting existing objects in your PDF, all of them located in the main panel. We recommend using the Object tool when creating most of your tags, since it automatically selects existing objects in your document with a simple click of a button.
Tagging a heading
With the object tool selected, you are ready to tag the first object – a heading. Left-click on the heading text, which selects the entire object, then right-click and select Tag As H1. Your first tag is complete! You can use this method to tag the rest of your headings.
Tagging a paragraph
Let’s continue by tagging a paragraph. As with other known editors, PDFix offers three different ways of selecting the objects in your document. First is a simple left-click, which was used to select an object in your PDF when tagging the initial headings. If you want to select more than just a simple object – for example, an entire paragraph – you can do so in two ways.
You can either select the text with the press of the left button and drag your mouse whilst the pointer is positioned over the desired object, or you can use a simple drag rectangle around it. We can use one of these selections to select the following paragraph and, once again, right-click and press Tag as text.
Tagging a list
PDFix makes it easy to tag more complicated structures, such as lists or tables, using a single button click. The process of tagging a list is no different from tagging a simple paragraph. Select the list, right-click and simply select Tag as List.
When tagging an object, the program automatically creates sub-tags based on the structure of the element. For example, when tagging a list, PDFix automatically creates the proper subtags, along with distinguishing and separating the numbering from the text of the list.
Proper tag placement
When tagging your document, remember to check the tag panel regularly to ensure that your created tag tree is complete and in the proper order. A newly generated tag will always be placed after the currently selected tag. If a new tag is misplaced, you can simply drag and drop it into its proper position in the tag tree.
Lastly, make sure to remember to tag the headers and footers properly. These operations mark the objects as artifacts, and therefore, your footers and headers are not in the tags panel.
Splitting an object into multiple tags
So far, we have only used the object tool. If you want to split an object into multiple tags, you can do so using the default tool. This tool allows you to select the text by single letters instead of individual objects. It can prove useful when tagging a part of the paragraph in a different way than the rest.
You can use the methods above to tag any object or structure present in your pdf. PDFix also offers a specialized table tool, which can be used if you are unhappy with the results when tagging your tables. This tool will be further introduced in the following videos and blog posts.
If your document is too long to tag manually, you can take advantage of the possibility of automatically tagging your PDF. Watch our Autotag video or read the related blog post to learn more. If your automatic tagging process results are incorrect, you can follow our further blog posts to learn how to fix wrong tags.
