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IT Unconference

PDF Accessibility: How to Find & How to Fix

Proposed by Sean Keegan

There is often a focus on making web pages accessible, yet this effort needs to expand to electronic documents, including PDFs. The Office of Digital Accessibility offers two tools to the Stanford community that can help you find your public-facing PDF documents and then remediate them for accessibility. This session will explore workflow processes for accessible electronic documents, how to use Siteimprove to identify problematic PDFs, and how the Equidox application can be used to fix PDF accessibility issues.
Notes

Introduction

  • Sean Keegan, Director, Office of Digital Accessibility - presenter

First point of advice: Use HTML when possible. PDF documents are harder to make accessible.

Accessibility barriers with PDFs

  • Scanned image versions
  • Lack of headings
  • Missing image descriptions
  • No logical reading order
  • Interactive forms with missing instructions

PDF Tags & Accessibility

  • Tags form a tree-like structure that contains information in and about the document.
  • Provide structure and reading order
  • Contains alternative text for images
  • Equivalent to HTML DOM tags - they provide information to assistive technology to aid consuming the document
  • Without tags, the document is not accessible

Creating accessible PDFs (or fixing them)

  • Easy path: Word (using accessible techniques) > Save as PDF or use Adobe PDF plugin. This retains structural information and flows through to the tags in PDF.
  • More complex path: InDesign (using accessible authoring techniques) > Choose Adobe PDF interactive format and check “create tagged PDF”. This again retains the structural information and flows through to the tags in PDF.
  • Other authoring tools do not export the structural information and therefore the document is not tagged when exported to PDF
  • Kinda-sorta Easy path: convert from PDF back to Word > apply accessible authoring techniques > convert back to PDF
  • Angry path: Use Adobe Acrobat Pro to semi-manually create PDF tags - this becomes challenging as content becomes difficult to work with in Acrobat

PDF numbers

  • From scanned public sites in Siteimprove: over 14k PDF documents
  • Many of these may be historical reference type of documents that are lower priority, but others that are higher visibility warrant attention

Find PDFs with Siteimprove

  • Siteimprove finds them and gives you a sense of the accessibility of a file. Also tells you the last time the file was modified.
  • Check for old files and consider removal of old, outdated files that are no longer needed. Then no need to fix them. 
  • Retaining files that are not accessible does amount to some level of risk when those documents are not accessible, which violates our policy.

Equidox Tool

  • A tool for fixing documents that is much easier than trying to do it in Acrobat.
  • Free web-based service - just sign in with SSO using SUNet
  • Upload your file
  • Equidox does an import process and recognizes text content, even some OCR if needed, and does “best guess” on what the content is. 
  • Boxes created around each section of content - shows you the type of content in each section and the reading order of each section.
  • Use sensitivity slider to group sections of content together
  • Mark content as headings, lists, etc as needed
  • Save
  • Use preview pane to show HTML equivalent of your page structure - shows how assistive technology would perceive the content
  • You can hide or “artifact” things like decorative styles/images
  • Export the new accessible PDF

Other Tools

  • PAC 2021 (windows only desktop app) - tells you all the things that are wrong with your PDF but does not fix them
  • CommonLook for PDF (Acrobat Pro plugin - windows only) - identifies, fixes and outputs accessible files. Requires Acrobat Pro and has a learning curve.

Strategies for PDFs

  • Find your files using Siteimprove
  • Remove unnecessary files
  • Remediate the ones you need to keep with Equidox and re-post

How we (Office of Digital Accessibility) can help

  • Weekly Siteimprove office hours
  • Equidox workshops on demand
  • Weekly accessibility office hours if you aren’t sure what to do with the PDF
  • Answer your questions

Available Tools & Resources on our website

  • Website accessibility
    • Siteimprove
    • Web Accessibility concepts
    • Accessibility office hours
  • PDF & Document Accessibility
    • Equidox
    • Document best practices
    • PDF Vendor Outsourcing (coming soon) - consider outsourcing the accessibility remediation if you are detailing with complex and/or long documents 

Questions from attendees:

  • Our faculty insist on putting the patient handouts pdfs online where they can print them more easily. What would you recommend for that?
    • Answer: if there is a need for the PDFs then let’s address the accessibility. There are some contexts where they are needed.
  • Is there a way to check if people are printing the files?
    • Answer: No. You still have the digital copy retained anyway and you never know how it will be used or spread by end users, so it should be made accessible.
  • I tried to upload a couple PDFs to Equidox, but they are not in the Documents and once the green checkmark appears post upload, the files are not visible. Where do I find them within the Equidox UI?
    • Answer: We’ll connect offline to troubleshoot. 
  • When do you recommend ePubs vs PDFs
    • Answer: It depends on who the intended audience is. You can also provide both. Challenge with ePub files is the need for an ePub reader to access them. If that is the expected interaction method for the audience, then that’s fine. But if that’s not the expectation then PDF is more easily distributable. ePub is better for STEM content, like MathML, so it is recommended for that.