Guidelines

The accessibility features available in the Expere Engine and Expere Authoring Tools are designed to enable implementation of accessibility requirements for PDF documents consistent with ADA Standards for Accessible Design as defined in the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and Section 508 Standards.

While the Expere Engine enables the option to render tagged PDF outputs, each organization is responsible for creating the content markup to support specific accessibility features in accordance with their own business requirements. Each organization is therefore responsible for the markup of tags within content and for determining the application of accessibility features for their own business requirements and desired user experience.

Important: Wolters Kluwer Financial Services’ core competency does not involve understanding of all requirements of the Americans with Disability Act (ADA). As such, Wolters Kluwer Financial Services, Inc. cannot and will not warrant that the Solution delivered by it will comply with all requirements of the ADA.

The guidelines for using Expere Engine to generate accessible documents with the appropriate markup tags for use by screen reader tools include the following:

The content author is encouraged to develop standards and guidelines in how the features are utilized.
Accessibility features are available for dynamic documents only. Accessibility features are not enabled for use when creating or editing static documents.
Accessible PDF outputs require the use of Apache FOP for print formatting. Apache FOP 1.1 is the version used by Expere for all FOP-based transformations to PDF output.
Accessibility features are implemented through tagging mark-up in the content and not through style sheet processing. The look and feel of PDF outputs in terms of ADA Standards for Accessible Design are not addressed in the features described in this guide.

About Apache FOP 1.1

The Apache FOP Version 1.1 implements a subset of the W3C XSL-FO 1.1 recommendation and provides improved handling of ADA and Section 508 requirements, support for complex font scripts, improved attribute-based flow name mapping, and other updates made available in this latest version of FOP.

Apache FOP is deployed with the Requirements Editor during installation and is also deployed in the Expere Testing System and Expere Engine.

Note: Content authors must structure the content to work with Apache FOP standards.