Accessible STEM documents > Full Document
The first overview of a document is often presented by a table of contents. However a screen reader may have difficulty inferring a usable reading. With an untagged document it relies on the screen reader inferring the structure, to pass to the underlying Accessibility tools.
On this document foxit produced the following reading (Acrobat is similar) when using a 2024 NVDA screen reader release.
Recent NVDA Releases have improved heuristics to control the reading of multiple dots and the reading with NVDA 2025.1 is much better however this does illustrate the difficulty in reading documents when no explicit structure is provided.
This still results in each link text being announced twice.
Using the tagged PDF, the structure is made explicit to the screen reader and typesetting artifacts such as leader dots are marked as artifacts and not read. Also link texts are only announced and read once. This produces a far more reliably understandable reading.
Here the recognition of the table of contents is unreliable, in some cases “Link” is announced before the section number, and sometimes after. The final link to the Citations section is not recognized as part of the table of contents at all, and is announced as a new list.