Many of us fail to consider the visually-impaired browsing experience. It’s a greatly underestimated area — as many as 20% of internet users have some form of visual impairment. 1 in 3 adults will experience blindness or partial sight as they age.
If your documents are inaccessible on the web, you’re losing business and credibility.
What’s the advantage of accessible PDFs? Quite simply, they allow users of adaptive technology to comprehend and navigate content. Without this functionality, adaptive technology may interpret the document in the wrong order, without important graphics, or in a format too jumbled for the user to comprehend.
All formatting ensures information is presented the way the author intended. Here are some of the requirements of remediation:
We work with you to find cost-effective solutions.
Email us your PDFs – it’s as simple as that.
PDFs are reworked to become accessible and interactive with assistive technologies.
We’ll send back compliant, highly-usable PDFs ready to go.
When you receive a document back from Accessibil-IT, it will retain its original look. However, we will have added:
There are no shortcuts. To make a document or form fully accessible and compliant, manual effort is required. Clicking a button to “add tags” won’t do the job. Further, automated tagging approaches are not able to properly recognize how your document should be read – or what the appropriate alt-text should be for your images.
If you have made an investment in design which is more creative than a straight memo format, the tags and alt-text need to be well thought out to guide adaptive technology through the correct order of the document or form, and convey the information the way the author intended it.
Programming a PDF to convert it to an accessible format requires a different ‘language’ than HTML. Think apples to oranges – organizations can’t expect their in-house web developers to be able to code accessible PDFs.
Curious as to why PDFs are the preferred format for distributing information? Here’s Adobe’s explanation of the benefits of using PDFs.
It’s possible to create an accessible HMTL version of your document, but the recoding time (and the hours billed by a web developer) causes businesses to stop short. Typically, converting HTML costs at least 4x more than creating an accessible PDF!
Accessible PDFs are tested using a combination of automated testing tools and manual procedures. The automated tool PDF Accessibility Checker (PAC) is widely used by organizations around the Globe. The results of any automated tool must be checked manually to determine if warnings or failures are accurate or if they are false.
We advocate additional testing through screen readers commonly in use today, such as JAWS or NVDA, to ensure the user experience is optimal.
Accessible PDF expertise is learned with a combination of sufficient technical training and hands-on experience.
Training takes time; an investment must be made to understand all accessibility requirements, how to use available tools, and how to address challenges that are invariably encountered.
Accessibil-IT uses a thorough checklist based on PDF/UA and WCAG 2.0 AA requirements. We use this checklist for every document to be sure we provide our clients with compliant PDFs. The summary attached outlines the primary items on our checklist, the purpose of the item and the value to the end user. Download checklist