Accessibility Issue Warnings When Saving to PDF/A and PDF/UA

PDF/A and PDF/UA formats impose a number of accessibility requirements related to document content that cannot be fulfilled during automatic conversion from Word to PDF. These requirements are described in the previous article “Working with PDF/A or PDF/UA”. Now warnings are issued for some of these problems.

Warnings are issued when saving to one of the PDF/A or PDF/UA formats and the issue violates compliance. For example, the warning about missing document title will be issued when saving to PDF/UA and will not be issued when saving to PDF/A.

All warnings are of WarningType.MinorFormattingLoss and WarningSource.Pdf. Here is a list of the new Description warning values:

Description warning value	PDF/A	PDF/UA
“The document contains headings which levels are not consecutive. This violates the compliance requirements. The output document will not be fully compliant.”
“There are shapes without alt text in the document. This violates the compliance requirements. The output document will not be fully compliant.”
“There are tables without alt text in the document. This violates the compliance requirements. The output document will not be fully compliant.”
“The document contains Unicode PUA characters. This violates the compliance requirements. The output document will not be fully compliant.”
“The document contains .notdef glyphs. This violates the compliance requirements. The output document will not be fully compliant.”