Transcript Accessible PDFs SCIT Notes

Accessible PDFs
Mark Hale
SCIT
6/20/2013
Agenda
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PDF issues
Bottom Line on PDFs
How to Triage PDFs
Your PDF Plan
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Vocabulary
• Accessibility
• Assistive Technology
• Screen Reader
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PDF Issues
• Inflexible representation of paper
• Display badly on mobile or assistive
technology
• Image PDFs are almost unusable for mobile
devices, and are inaccessible to screen readers
• In some counts, PDFs are fastest growing part
of web
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Bottom Line on PDFs
• Avoid them in favor of web
• Offer alternative presentations
• Use the web for forms and tables
• Avoid remediation in favor of re-creation or
replacement
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How to Triage PDFs
• Worst - Image PDFs
– Click in Acrobat selects whole page
• Text PDFs
• Click on a word selects the word
– File Properties says Untagged
• Tagged PDFs
– File Properties says Tagged
– Apply PAC and Acrobat Pro for more info
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Your PDF game plan
• Take inventory
– Use Google Advanced Search on your domain
– Count by species
– Carry out triage analysis
• Avoid or discard
• Re-build communication from source
– Convert to Word or Web
• Convert to survey or workflow (eventually)
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Adobe: Characteristics of Accessible
PDFs
• A logical structure and reading order
• Alternate text descriptions for figures, form
fields, and links
• Navigational aids
• Security that doesn’t interfere with AT
• Fonts that allow characters to be extracted to
text
• These are all things to be fixed
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How to Make Good PDFs
• Start with Structured Document in Word
• Save As PDF (built into Word) or use PDF
menu bar if Acrobat Pro is installed
• Don’t use forms or tables
• OR
– Remediate (at great difficulty)
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Remediation – the Whole Truth
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convert to text through optical character recognition, if it is an image PDF
add correct tags to all text elements
allocate structurally correct headings 1-6
mark each paragraph as single paragraph
mark listings as (interlaced) lists
define table headers for your data table
identify the documents correct reading sequence
add alternative texts to charts and images according to your desires
move layout graphics as well as headers and footers to the background
assign the correct language to the document
define language changes within the document
add bookmarks for easier navigation
define security settings such that they don't block assistive technologies
add field labels to form fields
define internal and external references (clickable links and indexes)
add correct assignments of foot notes
enable reading by means of text flow
eventually, the accessible document is put to a series of quality checks, performed by sighted and
blind experts
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