Removing outdated or irrelevant content enhances the user experience by ensuring that only essential and accurate information is presented. This is especially important for screen reader users, as it prevents them from spending time on content that is no longer relevant.
PDFs
Accessibility isn't optional—it's essential in every PDF.
PDFs, or Portable Document Format files, are designed to preserve the layout, formatting, and content of a document across different devices and platforms. They are commonly used because they ensure consistent presentation of content such as text, images, links, and forms.
The PDF Problem
While PDFs ensure a consistent appearance across different software and platforms, they can create significant challenges for people with disabilities—especially those using assistive devices like screen readers. Making a PDF accessible, a process known as PDF remediation, requires substantial resources.
- Technical Expertise: There is a steep learning curve in PDF remediation, as it requires specialized knowledge.
- Time: The time it takes to remediate a PDF varies depending on the document's complexity, the user’s expertise, and the chosen software.
- Cost: Remediation software can be expensive, and outsourcing the process to a professional service may be just as costly.
Should I use a PDF?
Before converting your content into a PDF and sharing it with students, you should ask the following 3 questions:
If you have the time, expertise, patience, and financial resources to remediate your PDF, you are welcome to do so. However, please note that UND does not currently have an enterprise license for PDF remediation. You may need to check with your department or college to see if they have access to remediation tools.
Additionally, you can visit TTaDA's Accessibility Lab, where a limited number of Adobe Acrobat licenses are available for document remediation.
PDF Creation
Should you choose to use a PDF, it is important to consider how the PDF was created. There are two primary methods:
- Exporting a document as a PDF: This method retains the text, structure, and formatting of the original document.
- Scanning a document in as a PDF: This method creates an image-based file, which lacks readable text and other accessibility features.
Exported PDFs
Creating an accessible PDF is always easiest when you have access to the original file. Prior to remediating an exported PDF, follow these steps:
Making changes to a PDF is challenging and often requires additional training. Whenever possible, return to the source document to fix any issues before converting it to a PDF.
Follow the accessibility action steps for each content type (Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) before converting these documents to PDFs.
Run the built-in Accessibility Checker to test for accessibility issues. This checker scans your document for potential issues that might prevent people with disabilities from accessing the content properly. It will highlight the issues, provide suggestions on how to fix them, and then prompt you to fix these issues. For more information, see Microsoft's Support documentation on Improving Accessibility with the Accessibility Checker.
There are several ways to convert Microsoft Documents to a PDF, but not all ways preserve the accessibility of the original document in PDF form. Moreover, not all file types support accessible conversions. At this time, converting PowerPoint documents to accessible, tagged PDFs is not available. If you choose to export PowerPoint documents to PDFs, they must be fully remediated using Acrobat Pro DC.
To preserve the accessibility of the original document, follow the instructions outlined in the tutorials below.
Scanned-In PDFs
When content creators scan a printed page into a PDF, the resulting file contains no recognizable text—only an image of the text. You can identify an image-only PDF if the text cannot be selected or searched within the document. For screen readers, these PDFs are treated as images rather than text. While a single image can be made accessible with a brief alt-text description, this approach is not feasible for an entire scanned PDF, regardless of its length.
When considering uploading a document as a scanned-in PDF, it's important to take the following steps to ensure accessibility:
If possible, locate digital alternatives to your scanned-in PDF. Publicly accessed digital versions are more likely to have built-in accessibility features. Consider accessing digital alternatives from the following locations:
- Download a PDF version from the library system.
- Download a PDF version from the Publisher
- Download a PDF version from research databases.
If you intend to scan-in a document, the original print copy must be clean and clear. Without a clean copy, OCR technology may miss valuable information in the scanning process.
- Remove handwriting, underlines, notations, and doodles.
- Ensure there are no colored highlights.
- Check for cut-off lines.
- Check for blurred text.
- Scan pages in the right orientation—portrait preferred.
- Scan pages individually; only one page of text should be visible per page.
Example: a decent scanned-in PDF.
The first step in making a scanned-in PDF accessible is to convert the image to text using optical character recognition (OCR) technology. OCRing a document essentially turns the flat image of a scanned-in PDF into searchable and editable text. You will know a PDF has been OCR'd if you can select the text in the document. While OCRing a document makes it readable to screen reader users, it does not fix any of the other problems of a scanned-in PDF, such as incorrect or missing tag structure, missing headings, etc.
Using OCR technology requires special software and programs, such as Adobe Acrobat Pro. These programs can be costly, so you may not be able to access these programs. If you don't have access to these programs, one alternative is to upload your scanned document into Blackboard. Blackboard Ally can automatically generate alternative file formats—including OCR'd PDFs. For more information, check out Blackboard's tutorial on how to OCR Documents Using Ally.
Introduction to Scanned in PDFs
PDF Remediation
Once your document has been converted into a PDF, you can start the remediation process using Adobe Acrobat Pro. Explore these pages for guidance on how to work with PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Resources
Consult the Accessibility Resource Index to find help articles on common accessibility issues in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Deque University
As part of its effort to meet the Title II ADA Digital Accessibility requirements, UND has partnered with Deque University to provide an expansive selection of on-demand digital accessibility training modules to all UND employees. Explore accessibility in Adobe Acrobat by taking the self-paced trainings, Basic PDF Accessibility and Advanced PDF Accessibility.