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Techniques for Accessible PDF: Headings

April 2025 by PDF Association staff

Headings are vital in organizing document content, especially with longer or complex documents. For assistive technology, the correct use of headings allows what would otherwise be an undifferentiated stream of text to become a navigable document in which readers can quickly find the content they want to read, and skip the content they don’t want to read.

Getting headings right is especially important with PDF documents, which can be very long, and may include deeply nested headings, multiple documents, document fragments, and more. Accessibility techniques for headings may therefore differ from techniques that are applicable to other technologies such as HTML.

On this basis the PDF Association is pleased to announce its second release of Techniques for Accessible PDF covering headings.

Phil Ydens and Jon Callas to keynote at the PDF Technical Conference 2015

September 2015 by Duff Johnson
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2 PDF-packed days; 3 tracks, 37 sessions, and two great keynote speakers: Adobe’s Phil Ydens and Silent Circle’s Jon Callas!

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September 2015 by Duff Johnson
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The 0.4 release includes the first complete (in principle) PDF/A-1b validation profile, and while unverified, tests well against the internal … Read more

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September 2015 by Duff Johnson
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Official PDF Association PDF/A and PDF/UA flyers updated

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August 2015 by Duff Johnson
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PDF creation is now native in Windows.

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August 2015 by Duff Johnson
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The complete specification for Unicode 8.0 is now available, with 7,716 new characters.

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July 2015 by Duff Johnson
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Release 0.2 of veraPDF does not yet perform PDF/A validation, but as a proof-of-concept it demonstrates the approach selected for … Read more

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July 2015 by Duff Johnson
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Link-farming with PDF (still) fools Google. What are they parsing, and what are they doing with what they get?

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July 2015 by Duff Johnson
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Will Android heavyweight Samsung introduce PDF annotation support?

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June 2015 by Duff Johnson
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The latest version of the Unicode Standard adds 7,716 new characters and six new scripts. New additions range from emoji characters (including … Read more

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June 2015 by Duff Johnson
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PDF/A adoption remains slow, even in European academic archives.

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June 2015 by Duff Johnson
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Will PDF/UA be an option or a requirement for PDF documents in the coming refresh of Section 508? Duff Johnson … Read more

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