A Comprehensive Guide to Pdf Accessibility Remediation
19 days ago
4 min read

A Comprehensive Guide to Pdf Accessibility Remediation

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Accessible PDFs are the need of modern businesses relying on effective document exchange. With the changing times, new accessible and inclusive standards are being developed. All the content that is available online is important to be made accessible to everyone. 

One such important content format that needs to be made accessible is the PDF format. PDF is short for Portable Document Format and is widely used to share content all over the world. Hence, the need to understand the ways of making PDFs accessible or PDF accessibility remediation is there. 

In this thorough guide, we will be exploring PDF and its key elements with some remediation techniques. Before diving deep into PDF accessibility remediation, it's important to know about the two main terms here. One is accessibility and the other is PDF.

What does accessibility mean?

In simple words, accessibility refers to the quality of being able to be used by anyone and everyone. Accessibility ensures that the content is available and understandable by all, especially people with disabilities. 

For example, a person with vision impairment might face difficulties in being able to read the content being displayed on the screen. Other examples where PDFs are inaccessible to some users are not providing alt texts, inconsistency in the order of reading, or wrong tags employed.

PDF being one of the most used formats for sharing documents brings out the urgency of making them accessible. This accessibility can be assured by adding special features that will support automatic screen readers or similar technology which will be of assistance to specially-abled people. 

PDF and its key elements

As discussed above, PDF is a format widely used for sharing of documents in softcopy. There are some basic fundamental elements of a PDF that bring everything together. Following are the 5 basic elements of a PDF:

  • Structure and Tagging of document

It is the most basic formatting of the PDF. It includes headings followed by paragraphs or headings followed by lists. Tagging is what helps in recognizing the headings and paragraphs.

  • Display, color, and contrast

After the structure of the PDF is decided and enforced by the usage of tags, the next element that comes into play is the display color of the PDF. It's important to have a color contrast between the text and the background. 

  • Alternative Text

Alt text is something that is provided in every document or content where PDF accessibility services use multimedia elements. It's not only a norm enforced by law but also morally ethical.

Alt text is nothing but giving alternative text to multi-media content added to the document. This alt text aims to explain the image, video, etc in text form.

  • Logical order of reading 

Order of reading is the way the document is supposed to be read. One cannot expect the readers to learn about the consequences of a phenomenon called global warming before we introduce the very concept in the beginning. 

Hence, the logical order of reading is decided by the intended flow of the information given in the document.

Techniques for PDF Remediation remediation

After learning about the concept of accessibility and the key elements constituting a PDF, we are ready to learn more about PDF accessibility remediation. 

Following are some of the remediation techniques to make accessible PDFs, one can use to make their PDF content accessible:

  • Providing alt text for images

The use of alt text for images is necessary for people suffering from visual impairments or those who are unable to load images by the PDF accessibility services. It helps in an easy understanding of the visual content.

  • Reading order adjustment

It is essential to define the proper order of the PDF content especially when you want to ensure ecommerce accessibility. It helps the users with assistive technologies to enjoy a proper reading order.

  • Accessibility of interactive elements

Last but not least, it is important to ensure the accessibility of the interactive elements. It helps ensure that people suffering from different impairments can quickly understand the interactive elements in the PDFs.

How do you check the PDF accessibility?

Once we have employed the remediation mentioned above techniques, we need to check how effective these techniques are. To test the accessibility of the PDF, we can try using the employed technology and the features. 

Such as we can try navigating the document just by using the screen reader. There are also some leverage accessibility checkers available in certain software such as Adobe Acrobat. These leverage accessibility checkers help to see what the exact issue is and also help in solving the issue.

Summing Thoughts

In conclusion, we can say that PDF accessibility remediation is a concept one must know in this day and age. As the accessibility rules develop, so do the remedies to ensure the accessibility of different types of content are evolving too. 

The remedies mentioned above in the article are sure to help one create PDFs inclusive and accessible. Testing the existing remedies being used is crucial while also staying in touch with the new technological updates.