As you think of making your website content accessible, make sure you also optimize your documents, including PDFs, Word documents, PowerPoint slides, Excel spreadsheets, etc. to meet document accessibility standards. However, before you put time and effort into creating an accessible PDF, you must first consider this question:

Does this really need to be in PDF format?

PDFs provide a poor user experience for all users:

  • Visitors using mobile devices and screen magnifiers must zoom in or out and repeatedly scroll horizontally and vertically to comfortably read PDFs.
  • PDFs often lack navigation (such as headings and sub-headings), making it difficult for users to know the context of what they're reading and how to move through it.
  • Screen readers often produce gibberish or sentence fragments if visual layouts are not tagged to create a logical reading order.
  • PDFs are created with dense text and graphics. These increase file size and download time and can have a huge impact on mobile data plans.
  • For visitors using screen readers or keyboard navigation, PDF forms are often difficult or impossible to complete.

PDF Misconception 

Posting a PDF online is easier and faster than creating a webpage.
Reality: It takes more time to update and handle revisions with a PDF than a webpage. To make simple changes, you have to find the original document or latest version of it, make your changes, and ensure it's accessible. Testing the PDF's accessibility may need you to manually check that every item is tagged correctly, the reading order makes sense, and the entire document can be navigated using a keyboard. Then you have to save it as a new PDF, upload it to the web, and confirm that any existing links point to the new document. In contrast, if the content of the document was a webpage instead, you would only have to find the webpage, then make your changes and publish them using the page's editor tools. 

Posting a PDF

If you must provide content exclusively as a PDF:

  • Follow the 10 Best Practices when creating it. In addition:
    • Use your keyboard to tab through the content to verify it has a logical reading order. Adjust the tab order accordingly.
    • Ensure that the fonts used allow extracting the characters into text.
    • Label the form fields as interactive, and include clear and specific error messages.
    • Make sure that any security settings within the PDF do not interfere with screen readers.
    • Create a webpage that summarizes the core information and provides the option to download the full PDF.
  • Alternatively, send the document to a remediation service like CommonLook to tag it for screen readers.

Accessible Alternatives

Making PDFs accessible is time-consuming, sometimes hard, and often expensive. You can avoid this expense with several alternatives:

  • Convert the content into webpages.
  • Convert the content into webpages, and provide the PDF as a print-friendly alternative.
  • Provide the PDF, and create an "accessible" alternative web page that is truly equivalent. It must satisfy ADA requirements, including reproductions or text equivalents for images, charts, and graphs.

Some cases do require a PDF, but that doesn't mean that the content should exist only in PDF format.

Learn More

Off