Features of an Accessible PDF

Stephanie: Welcome to Accessibility in Five, a series from UFIT where we explore a quick tip on making your content more accessible in five minutes, or less. I'm Stephanie, and today's topic is features of an accessible PDF.

Now, I'm sure no one of you saw this coming after our last PDF video. As we mentioned in that video, PDFs are notoriously difficult file type to make accessible. Depending on how the PDF was created, either it's only as accessible as the original file format, or it needs to be run through OCR, or optical character recognition, and then tagged using a PDF editing tool like Adobe Acrobat Pro, or Foxit Phantom. Despite these tools having auto-tagging features, we've seen many instances where auto-tagging says it's successful and the PDF technically passes the built-in accessibility check within the software used, but it's inaccessible once you look at the individual pages, or try to use a screen reader.

Even though the PDF can look good on the surface, or the original file type might pass accessibility checkers, there can still be accessibility issues. It takes a lot of time and repetitive practice to be able to make even simple PDFs accessible, let alone the hours it could take for complicated PDFs. Even if time isn't an issue, there is the other common issue we see, which is accessing PDF editing software. Most software that allows you to remediate PDFs is behind some paywall. Using Adobe Acrobat, you may need the paid version, Adobe Acrobat Pro to be able to access many accessibility features. Foxit Phantom is available in UF apps, but that is only available to students, not staff members. Other more comprehensive software can be extremely expensive to purchase and have a steep learning curve.

Despite these hurdles, there are certain features that stand out when we talk about PDF accessibility and remediation. These features include tagging structures, like heading levels, is something an image or is it text, reading order (what order a screen reader will read information in), setting a language in title of the PDF, including alternative text that's specific to the context of the image, color contrast that's at an appropriate contrast ratio, etc. There are a lot of different elements of PDFs that need to be considered. Because of how complicated PDF remediation is in general, we tend to recommend that instructors and staff members not use PDFs in most situations, and instead to use the native file format. Granted, there are always exceptions. But in about 95% of the situations we've consulted on, the best solution was to avoid PDFs.

Thanks for watching accessibility in five. You can find this video, as well as previous ones archived in the resources section of the CITT website at citt.ufl.edu. Tune in next time to learn about disability models and language use.