How Accessible are your PDF Files?

How is PDF accessibility measured?

People often conceptualize document accessibility in one of two ways. Some take a binary view- a document is either accessible or it isn’t, with a standard such as WCAG 2.0, a piece of legislation or an arbitrary accessibility checker’s results taken as the deciding factor. A more correct view sees document accessibility as falling on a spectrum of accessibility, with standards or legislated requirements as markers along that spectrum. A functional definition says that an accessible PDF should be able to be used or accessed by all users, regardless of disabilities.

What about the accessibility checker?

There are a range of accessibility checker tools out there, but the quality varies. Many do not let you choose which standards to test for. Some don’t even specify which accessibility standards they use to check. Worse still, many are simply inadequate. Check out our article on about accessibility checkers.

How are accessible PDF files made?

No matter which theory you subscribe to, the accessibility of a PDF document is decided by the authoring tool used to generate the file, and the remediation work done afterwards.

Some PDF files are generated without a tag structure. This results from authoring tools (both the application used to produce the content, and the software used to make the PDF) that do not support the tagging feature. These files will not be accessible by any measure.

Others PDF files are generated with authoring tools that will automatically tag the content in your document. The software used to produce the document will pass along the document’s formatting to the software being used to generate the PDF file. An example of this would be Microsoft Word passing along the formatting information to Adobe Acrobat, which provides support for creating tagged PDFs.

The end product will depend on the simplicity of the document, the quality of the formatting and the design of the document. These files will be somewhat accessible but will fall short of any recognized standards (and therefore any legislation).  Most of the PDF files available online fall into this category.

See our articles on PDF tags and the PDF/UA format for more information.

PDF remediation

The automatic tagging process is imperfect. Therefore, newly generated tagged PDF files will always need some corrective action to be taken before the PDF reaches a level of accessibility needed to meet recognized standards including the WCAG 2.0. This corrective action (referred to as PDF remediation) is time consuming and requires careful, knowledgeable human inspection, testing, and specialized training.  And what if you or someone else in your organization edits or revises the original document? You must re-do it. PDF is an end format.

That’s why we are here. We are here to help. Contact us now!