SSRS reports and accessibility

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I am creating reports using ssrs many of which will be internal but some will for the public. And if the report is exported as a .pdf for public download then that .pdf must be accessible. Before we can post any pdfs on our web site we use the full version of Adobe to check for accessibility. So my question is are there settings or things to do in SSRS so that the pdf that is generated when the report is exported has little to no accessibility issues?

I've looked at a couple different reports and whether a simple one table report or a report of three tables within a rectangle the accessibility issues are numerous from alt text to table list and heading problems.

My company has had a lawsuit regarding accessibility of documents on our web site so it is of the utmost importance that we create reports that are accessibility compliant. Thanks for any guidance with this.

accessibility reporting-services
2 Answers

Interesting question. I was going to put this in the comment section but it was too long. It's not a direct answer to your question but might help.

Since SSRS is from Microsoft, I would hope that it would generate accessible PDF. If you edit a Word document and "save as" to PDF, it creates a pretty decent accessible pdf. And by "accessible PDF", I'm talking about a "tagged pdf". Since Word does a decent job, and SSRS is by the same company, hopefully SSRS can do a decent job too.

To start with, is a tagged PDF generated from SSRS? If not, then you're in worse shape than I thought. I'm guessing you at least have a tagged PDF otherwise the Adobe checker wouldn't work.

In using the Adobe checker, I assume you're using Tools > Accessibility > Full Check? And then you look at the checker results in the left navigation panel?

You can also look at the "Matterhorn Protocol", which lists PDF failures for accessibility. I'm guessing that the Adobe checker is using the Matterhorn list.

user_767140

We had a support ticket with Microsoft about this issue. They advised us to edit this portion of the rsreportserver.config file. This applies to SSRS 2019. I do not believe this is supported in earlier versions, but you should confirm with Microsoft whether it will work for your specific version.

My rsreportserver.config was found in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services\SSRS\ReportServer. Yours may be different depending on how you performed the install.

After you edit the file you will need to restart SSRS Services for the change to take effect.

<!-- Updated per Microsoft instructions
<Extension Name="PDF" Type="Microsoft.ReportingServices.Rendering.ImageRenderer.PDFRenderer,Microsoft.ReportingServices.ImageRendering"/> -->

<Extension Name="PDF" Type="Microsoft.ReportingServices.Rendering.ImageRenderer.PDFRenderer,Microsoft.ReportingServices.ImageRendering">
    <Configuration>
        <DeviceInfo>
            <AccessiblePDF>True</AccessiblePDF>
        </DeviceInfo>
    </Configuration>
</Extension>
             
<!-- End change per Microsoft -->

After applying this change, most accessibility checks in Acrobat DC are passing.

user_94694930
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