PDF Accessibility Descriptive Transcript

Audio Visual
Hi, my name is Anaya Jones and I want to talk to you about PDF Accessibility. PDF Accessibility Title Slide
Commonly known by their acronym, PDF actually stands for Portable Document Format. PDF is an open standard released by Adobe. PDF was originally created for printing. The PDF file includes everything that's needed for other people to open the file and see it just as you created it, including fonts and other information. Because it maintains the look that's created for a document, you can trust that it will print the same. Slide: Portable Document Format
George Kurscher, the chief innovations officer at the Daisy Consortium, who is a blind screen reader user, often says that PDF actually stands for pretty damn frustrating. Slide: Pretty Damn Frustrating
Why? There are some common accessibility barriers with PDFs. The text of PDFs doesn't automatically reflow when you change the size of your screen. If something were to reflow, the width of the text would adjust with the size of your screen so you wouldn't have to scroll back and forth in order to read all of the content. There is an option to have PDFs reflow, and some of them will, but most readers don't know where that setting is. Additionally, some readers have an easier time reading if they use comic sans or another specific font. PDF fonts can't be changed by the reader.

Slide: Accessibility Barriers

Includes brief demonstration of a PDF that doesn't reflow.
The structure of PDFs is really important for understanding where some of these accessibility barriers occur. PDFs are ideally made up of three layers. That includes the visual layer that you see, a layer of actual content and a tag structure layer. Slide: PDF Layers or Views. Shows animation of a circle labeled PDF that expands to show three layers, the physical or visible, the content, and the tag.
If a PDF only has that visual layer, it's basically an image. It may have text on the screen, but it's basically- it may as well be a landscape. It's not machine readable. Scanned PDFs are basically pictures Slide
Next is the actual text content layer of the document, and that's what screen readers and other assistive technology are actually going to read. However, a lot of documents, if they're scanned, don't have this layer. Now we can add this text content layer through something called optical character recognition or OCR. This is an automated process, so it can make mistakes. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Making the visible text machine readable Slide
It's also not enough to just have that text layer. You also need the tag structure that goes along with it. This tag layer is what tells the screen reader what kind of information it’s parsing and creates a heading or semantic structure for the document.

Tag Structure is very important: Slide

Brief demonstration of the tag panel in Adobe.
Now there is a standard for accessible PDFs that's PDF slash. UA. It was released in and updated in. It dictates that certain things have to happen for a document to be accessible. This includes complete tagging of the real content, a logical reading order. Those tags must be there to correctly represent the document's semantic structure. This includes headings, lists, tables, etc. The standard also includes using those headings logically in a way that's going to actually help people navigate, it includes having high contrast for colors and avoiding inaccessible JavaScript or other characteristics. It also requires that meaningful graphics include alternative text and that security settings allow assistive technology to access the content. It also means that fonts are embedded and the text is mapped to Unicode. PDF/US or ISO 14289-1 Slide. Described in audio.
There is a lot that goes into PDF accessibility, but there are a few really easy things that you can do. If you create documents in word with the intention to save them to a PDF, be careful to use the save as function or the Adobe Pro Create PDF function and not the print to pdf function. Printing to a pdf creates a document without tags, even if you were careful to create an accessible document in Word. If you prefer to use Google Docs know that when you save as a pdf from Google Docs that resulting document isn't tagged either. Word will automatically set your language, but you can set your document title in the info panel of Word or in the properties of your PDF in Adobe. If you download Adobe Pro, you can also use the accessibility tools to do an accessibility check or auto tag a document without tags. Fixing many errors or a tag layer can take additional knowledge, but running the accessibility check takes just a few clicks, and you can get a general sense for how your document is doing. There will always be at least two issues as these need manual checks. I hope this quick presentation gave you a better sense for the strengths and challenges of PDFs as well as a few quick things you can do to remove some barriers from the PDFs you create. PDF Accessibility Basics Slide.
If you have questions, please let me know. Closing Slide: Thanks! Any Questions? Anaya Jones ana.jones@northeastern.edu