Accessible Documents
Think of a well-organized book with a table of contents, headings, and labeled sections. Now imagine that same book with no chapters, no page numbers—just a wall of unstructured text. That’s the difference between an inaccessible PDF and one designed with accessibility in mind.
Beyond your website, accessibility also extends to digital documents such as PDFs, Word documents and PowerPoints. Creating accessible documents ensures they meet all other standards as a regular web page and are readable for everyone.
If you don’t have a legal requirement to deliver a certain document type, we recommend just placing the contents of said document on a web page in plain text, as this is inherently more accessible.
PDF Files
PDFs are widely used in today’s business world as they’re easy to create, share, and use. Yet, many PDFs remain inaccessible to individuals with disabilities, limiting their inclusivity.
- Ensure your PDF is correctly and fully tagged (important!).
- Document information needs to be set up properly including a descriptive title, etc.
- Include language definitions by adding appropriate language tags to your PDFs with the /Lang entry. If you have PDF available in multiple languages, make sure each version is tagged properly.
- The reading order must be accurate.
- All images and tables need alt text and/or summary.
- Color Contrast, hyperlinks, headings and readable text must follow standard accessibility guidelines.
- Make sure PDFs are NOT just a scan or an image of text — this makes it impossible for users using assistive technology to read them.
- Add bookmarks for PDFs over 9 pages.
Do not rely solely on Adobe’s accessibility checker. Acrobat Pro’s accessibility feature can only detect certain accessibility issues, so you must carefully review the output.
In Summary: Accessible online documents, including PDFs and Word documents needs to meet web accessibility standards by incorporating features like proper tagging, an accurate reading order, high color contrast, alt text, with plain text web pages often being the most inclusive option.