Rise PDF exports - Accessibility issues

(N.B. I edited this post on April 12 to clarify some comments and add additional information).

Hello community

I know about the many accessibility features of online Rise content (as well as which elements are not accessible - e.g., sorting), however my team provides a PDF of the Rise content for student use and we continually run into many accessibility issues for the PDFs. After creation of the PDF and use of the Accessibility Checker in Adobe Acrobat, many accessibility issues are flagged. The raw PDF export is not readable for a screen reader and it is a very complex and lengthy process to manually tag it to make it somewhat accessible. This process often results in new issues popping up when using the accessibility tools in Adobe to address the flagged issues. Often the issues cannot be addressed at all (e.g., the information box element is not legible) and workarounds must be employed . The alternative to manually tagging the file is to use the auto-tag feature in Adobe, which does not catch everything and manual intervention is needed after the fact as well.

This is not an Adobe problem. When creating a PDF export of a Word document, Adobe reads the PDF beautifully with little to no accessibility issues, with any normally caused by user omittance (e.g., forgotten alt text). The PDF exports for the Rise content are problematic with issues such as blocks of text being missed, some elements (especially interactive elements) being illegible, and more. It does not matter if you have created the content accessibly within Rise itself; the PDF export will be problematic no matter what.

I have worked with several team members on this issue, some who have been attempting to create accessible PDFs from the Rise content for longer than I have. We have also consulted with other departments using Rise. We all run into the same issues and have no answers. Other teams have opted to stop using the PDF export from Rise and go through a second process of creating a Word document of the Rise content for any student with accessibility needs.

We would love for Articulate to address the various accessibility issues of the Rise PDF export and provide a product that is fully accessible. Customizability of the export would be an added bonus so that things like awkward page breaks and unnecessary images can be modified or omitted.