@taeche Thank you for reporting the problem to us. Bu i am afraid this is the expected behavior. I have checked tags structure in the PDF produced by Aspose.Words and the image is the first:
But in reading order it is the 4th. MS Word behaves exactly the same. Please see the PDF document produced by MS Word 2019 on my side: ms.pdf (24.1 KB)
@alexey.noskov thank you for looking into this. To give some context, I’m from the same team with @taeche.
Just want to follow up:
We’re using the WCAG guidelines to ensure accessibility of the documents we produce. From WCAG [PDF3: Ensuring correct tab and reading order in PDF documents (w3.org)]https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Techniques/pdf/PDF3.html
“The tab order must reflect the logical order of the document.” As we can verify the logical order is not preserved during conversion from DOCX to PDF. In DOCX it’s Logo-Paragraph-Paragraph, in PDF it’s Paragraph-Paragraph-Logo.
The MS Word’s DOCX-to-PDF converter does seem to also have this bug, but since Aspose.Word is a separate product, would it make sense for Aspose to implement conversion according to accessibility standards?
@kikomi@taeche I have logged this issue into our defect tracking system as WORDSNET-24335. We will investigate it and let you know if it is possible to change the reading order.
@kikomi@taeche It seems that Acrobat “Reading Order” tool do not display the reading order correctly for Aspose.Words PDF output. Apparently this tool is not intended to work with tags generated not by Acrobat. Here is a quote from Acrobat help:
The Reading Order tool is intended for repairing PDFs that were tagged using Acrobat, not for repairing PDFs that were tagged during conversion from an authoring application.
The reading order could be verified by the tags order (which is actually the source for reading order) in the Acrobat “Tags” pane, the “Read Out Loud” Acrobat feature or PAC3 “Screen Reader Preview” feature. All above gives the correct reading order for Aspose.Words PDF output.
I’m going to close WORDSNET-24335 issue as ‘Not a Bug’. Please feel free to ask if you have any other questions.