Accessibility Issue: CS / cs Operator Errors When Applying Fill Color in Tagged Table (PAC Validation Failure)

[ajaykrdas]

Bug Report

Description of the problem

When attempting to generate an accessible PDF with tagged tables, the generation or validation fails with the following error in PAC (PDF Accessibility Checker):

Operator 'CS' not allowed in this current state.
Operator 'cs' not allowed in this current state.

This occurs specifically while applying fill or stroke colors

Code sample

Your environment

• pdfkit version:
• Node version:
• Browser version (if applicable):
• Operating System:

[judithmh]

I encountered the same issue and found a workaround:

with .stroke("silver"); I got the CS error but separating the color and the stroke function solved the issue:

doc.save().strokeColor("silver").rect(x, y, width, height).stroke().restore();

It is important to then mark the strokes as Artifacts for accessibility, to differentiate them from actual content.

Here you can find the full implementation of the table which passed all PAC checks (our table has both column and row headers, which is why we additionally needed the scope attribute for the headers which is not part of the typed version of pdfkit and needed yet another workaround)

Hope this helps :)

[ajaykrdas]

I encountered the same issue and found a workaround:

with .stroke("silver"); I got the CS error but separating the color and the stroke function solved the issue:

doc.save().strokeColor("silver").rect(x, y, width, height).stroke().restore();

It is important to then mark the strokes as Artifacts for accessibility, to differentiate them from actual content.

Here you can find the full implementation of the table which passed all PAC checks (our table has both column and row headers, which is why we additionally needed the scope attribute for the headers which is not part of the typed version of pdfkit and needed yet another workaround)

Hope this helps :)

Thanks @judithmh
I had already implemented similar changes last month to address the accessibility issue.

ajaykrdas@920a59f