PDF Accessibility

As more and more scholars and educators realize the importance of making online content accessible, many authors are thinking about ways to ensure their content can be reached by anyone who wants to access it. Unfortunately, not all PDFs are automatically set up for full web accessibility. Fortunately, however, there is a new tool you can use to ensure your journal's PDFs are full accessible.

Starting next year, published university materials need to meet a standard of accessibility, put together by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI). This ensures that everyone can access content in a way that meets their needs, which will require adjustments and modifications. The WAI has also put together a helpful set of tools for meeting accountability guidelines in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.2, such as this "how to" link to set your publication up for success.

A standard acronym used to help think about the comprehensive accessibility of a given web page or document is "POUR" - which stands for Perceivability, Operability, Understandability, and Robustness. Keeping these principles in mind can help to ensure that you publications are up to the standards of accessibility.

If you are using Adobe Acrobat (which is also available in the Digital Studio) there is also a new tool that can go line by line in your PDF to let you know what might need to change in order to meet accessibility standards. One of the tools at your disposal in Adobe Acrobat is "Prepare for Accessibility"

The Prepare for Accessibility suite gives you a number of options, including creating and opening an accessibility report, which will provide guidance in ways to make your PDF more accessible.

Among the above, users can select options like:

• Change reading options: This option allows the user have more control over how screen readers interact with the document. There are a number of drop-downs which can help screen-readers determine the order of a document, as well as tagging options for reading order.

• Check for accessibility: This option opens an accessibility checker which will go through the document and flag different issues. The checker has options as far as what to look for, and produces a series of dropdowns which link back to the instance in the document that may need correction.

• Open accessibility report: An accessibility report will let you know if you document passed or failed on a number of different points, and directs you to where you may need to manually check the document regarding accessibility concerns.

• Add alternate text: In order to make sure that images are accessible to screen readers, they must have alternate text. This may require decisions about what to include, for instance - while providing alt-text for a border decoration might make the site experience more full - it could also clutter the screen-reader with information that is not pertinent - and even could distract from - the content.