Why and How to Find Alternatives to PDFs

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 why and how to find alternatives to PDFs.

PDFs are some of the most common file formats I see while helping instructors create their content. They're used for journal articles, handouts, and even PowerPoint handouts. However, just because they're a common file type that we use doesn't necessarily mean it's the best choice. With PDF file types, even though they're seemingly always available, they're one of, if not, the most challenging file type to get completely accessible. PDF files are typically files that originate in a different format first, are scanned images of something, usually textbooks in higher education, and supposedly make the document un-editable, but easily shared. This may have been the case when PDFs were first invented, but nowadays, even the un-editable PDF is editable through different software like Adobe Acrobat Pro and Adobe Photoshop. Even though this is still an argument that we hear, it is somewhat of a myth. Please note that there are a couple of instances where using PDFs is appropriate, like preparing a document for print or when creating a complex chart that will have accompanying alternative text or descriptions of the PDF.

As alluded to, PDFs are notoriously difficult to make accessible. There are a lot of different elements within a PDF that need to be taken care of before it can be considered accessible. One of the first steps is to make sure that the text within a PDF has been run through OCR, or optical character recognition. This process changes images of words into the text that is actually in the document and makes that text selectable.

Then, you also have the tagging structure and the reading order. This tagging order needs to be evaluated to make sure that all heading levels are accurately tagged within the document, which can get complicated once you introduce images with alternative text, figures, captions, lists, etc. Reading order sets the order that information on a document is presented to a person using assistive technology like a screen reader. Sometimes both of these aspects of a document can interfere with one another or you might find part of the content is just structured in a way that's technically available, but nearly impossible to make accessible through tagging. Don't forget alternative texts that might need to be included, color contrast, list structures, and any hyperlink text with meaningful link text.

All of these different elements make PDFs absurdly difficult to remediate. In fact, remediating a PDF document for accessibility can take our student workers, who have completed many of these remediations, anywhere from two hours to several weeks to complete a remediation task for a document.

Now, how do we find alternatives if these file types are so common? Great question. There are several alternatives that we can use when selecting what types of files we use in our courses. The first recommendation that we always make to instructors is to use the native file format. This means to use the file format that you originally used to create the PDF. For example, Word documents and PowerPoints are two really common file formats that we would recommend using over PDFs. These file types allow instructors, instructional designers, or whoever is creating content for a course to easily apply accessibility tactics without the need for specialized software like Adobe Acrobat Pro or Equidox. For example, it's much easier applying heading structure metadata in Microsoft Word than it is to tag a whole PDF with the same structure.

Another option if you're unsure what alternatives you can use to take a look at alternative formats from Ally. In Canvas on every page, you should see this icon. That looks like a letter A with an arrow pointing downwards next to it. This tool allows students to download content in different formats that might meet their needs for specific situations. For example, if they're extremely busy and don't have time to sit down and read a journal article, they can get an MP3 version of the article and listen to it on the go. This tool can give you ideas of other formats that might be useful like the HTML or EPUB version of a text. However, please note that this tool should be used to get ideas about what alternative formats to use and not always as a replacement of finding alternative file formats to PDFs, as the output is only as good as the original document is accessible.

Now, if you feel like you have to use PDF and there's no other option, we highly recommend that you consider finding these PDFs through Course Reserves within Canvas. Course Reserves is a tool managed by the UF libraries where it is the responsibility of the vendor to create and maintain accessible versions of these documents. All in all, we highly recommend trying to use other file formats than PDFs. Not only are they difficult and time consuming to make accessible, but there are many easier alternative options that you can use within your courses.

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 month to learn about audio descriptions.