Making Your PDF Documents More Inclusive
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The best way to ensure a PDF document supports inclusivity is by focusing on accessibility when the document is being created
Making Your PDF Documents More Inclusive Heading link
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a common way to distribute course materials to students and ensuring PDF documents meet state and federal accessibility guidelines is crucial. In addition to supporting learners with disabilities, accessible PDF documents also streamline the distribution of course content because more students have access and fewer individual accommodations are needed. Accessible PDF documents are also more easily reviewed by assistive technologies, such as screen readers, and can be readily converted into other alternative formats, such as ePub and electronic braille formats, through tools like Anthology Ally in Blackboard. This blog post describes several strategies for improving the accessibility of PDF documents in your course.
Creating Inclusive PDF Documents
The best way to ensure a PDF document supports inclusivity is by focusing on accessibility when the document is being created. For example, if you start with a Word document that includes accessible components, including semantic structure and Alt text for images, your resulting PDF document will likely meet accessibility guidelines. Similarly, if you start with a flawed document, the PDF you export will also be flawed. There are many simple steps that can support accessibility when creating a PDF document, including setting a document’s language and providing a document title. It is also important to add structural features that describe the overall organization of a PDF document.
Include Tags
While many students access PDF documents visually, students with visual impairments use assistive technologies to review course materials. These assistive technologies need additional information to discern the structural hierarchy of a document, including which lines are section headers and body text. Tags label a PDF document’s structure and exist as an additional layer of information, invisible to human readers but accessible by computers. Review this tutorial on tagging PDF documents to get started. Alternatively, if you are converting a Word document to a PDF, make sure your Word document includes headings, table headers, and properly-formatted bulleted or numbered lists.
Add Alt Text to Images
Non-text visual elements embedded in a PDF document are not inherently accessible to individuals with vision impairments. Alt text, which briefly describes any non-text elements within a PDF document, including images and graphics, is one way to overcome this barrier. While this text is not visible to sighted users, it is a type of metadata accessed by assistive technologies. Most content creation platforms that include images, such as Microsoft Word and Google Docs, also include Alt text options. You can add Alt text to a figure within a PDF with Adobe Acrobat Pro. Review the Poet Training Tool’s website to practice writing appropriate image descriptions for various content.
Remediating PDF Documents with Anthology Ally
Launched for the Fall 2023 semester at UIC, Ally provides instructors with the capacity to better understand the accessibility of their course materials. While there is no one sure-fire recipe for remediating PDF documents that do not meet accessibility guidelines, Ally can support instructors by providing feedback in the form of accessibility scores for course content. An instructor can upload a document to their Blackboard course site and then find a red, yellow, or green gauge icon indicating a low, medium, or high accessibility score, respectively.
This checklist provides helpful information on how PDF documents are scored for accessibility with Ally. Once you know how a document is scored, you can remediate any accessibility issues that may arise. This reference guide is aligned with Ally’s checklist and can serve as a problem-solving tool for improving the accessibility of your PDF documents.
Locate Source Documents
If you find a PDF document that does not meet accessibility guidelines, your first step should be to locate the source material, if possible. Because most PDF files are typically created in other applications, editing is typically faster and easier in the native document format. For example, if the source material is a Word document, structural edits may be more straightforward in Word rather than in a PDF editor. In some cases, the best course of action may be to locate the physical book and rescan the required portion using a high-quality PDF editor like Adobe Acrobat Pro because this will ensure OCR will be applied, making the text searchable. Similarly, if a PDF document is malformed or distorted, you might try to obtain a previously saved version that is known to be uncorrupted.
Ensure Text is Searchable
Selectable and searchable text provides learners that use assistive technologies a way to read or perceive content. Additionally, this provides all learners a direct way to search for specific content. You can check your PDF documents by opening them in any PDF reader then attempting to select or highlight an individual word. You can also search for a word known to be in the file. If you cannot do either of these, your PDF document is likely a scanned image. Thankfully, there are many ways to address this issue. If you are using Adobe Acrobat Pro, there is an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) feature built into the “recognize text” feature. Ally also has integrated OCR capabilities.
Next Steps
Whether you are creating or editing a PDF document, be sure to use software that supports accessibility features. Adobe Acrobat Pro is one powerful PDF editor that can be downloaded for free by many UIC employees from the University of Illinois Webstore. When finalizing a document, you should also use the accessibility check features, including those in Adobe Acrobat Pro and the Microsoft suite. While this is an essential final step, it is important to note that accessibility checkers will not automatically make all content accessible. Many accessibility issues are beyond the scope of checkers and require a human to review content for accuracy.
Accessibility is an ongoing, yet invaluable, process. The instructional design team at IDMPS can provide support as you make your course materials more accessible. Schedule an appointment with our accessibility specialists Patrick Horton and Nicole Messier. For more technical information on digital accessibility, reach out to UIC IT for a digital accessibility consultation or visit Accessibility at Information Technology.