Pdf Accessibility: Enabling Inclusive Wellness Resources

Have you heard about digital accessibility yet?

It is the dedicated process of ensuring the creation of digital resources fulfilling the required needs of people with disabilities. Do you know that around 15% of the current world population is suffering from a significant disability? 

These may include some disabilities like hearing, vision, mobility, cognitive, memory issues, or others. It is essential to make your digital resources highly accessible for people with disabilities.

A majority of the wellness resources are published in PDF formats only. So today, let us explore the world of inclusive health education. We’ll understand the importance of PDF accessibility in making lives of the people with disabilities easier. 

Starting with a detailed understanding of the people requiring accessible wellness resources.

Who Requires Accessible Wellness Resources- An Inclusive Approach

Let us start our journey to empower accessible health education by understanding its beneficiaries.

A significant number of people suffer from one or another type of disability. Some of the common disabilities include the following:

• Speech impairment

In this condition, a person has problems forming the speech sounds necessary for communicating with each other. 

Helpful tools: Speech-generating devices, and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC).

• Seizures

It involves the excessive search of the electrical activity in the human brain. It can be due to brain injury, genetics, or some other reasons. 

Helpful tools: Different methods to reduce motion.

• Cognitive impairments

It includes different intellectual disabilities or other problems affecting normal cognitive ability. It can be due to neurogenerative diseases or brain injuries.

Helpful tools: Text prediction, text highlighting, abstract summarization, and screen readers.

• Hearing impairments

It indicates the partial or full loss of hearing ability. It can be due to different environmental or biological reasons.

Helpful tools: Sign language, transcript, captions, and hearing aids.

• Mobility impairments

It includes different physical disabilities like manual dexterity, upper or lower limb disability/ loss, or different organ disabilities.

Helpful tools: Speech input, mouth or head stick, eye tracking device, and adaptive switches.

• Visual impairments

It is the reduced ability to see to a level that is not fixed by medication or glasses. It can be due to degenerative conditions, trauma, or diseases.

Helpful tools: Braille output devices, screen magnification tools, and screen reader software.

Apart from the common disabilities observed in the people, it is important to pay attention to some other factors. These may not come directly under disabilities but are the common issues hindering the accessibility of wellness resources for a significant audience. These include the following:

• Old people with age-related issues

They require a large target size for buttons on touch devices due to age-related hand tremors. Some may require large fonts for reading on the wellness resources due to vision correction with glasses.

• Non-native speakers

These may cover people who’re not fluent in the language of the health resources and may need help to understand them.

• Mildly disabled

These include people who require captions for videos or eyeglasses for screen reading.

• Situationally disabled

It covers people unable to play audio or video in public places or unable to read due to sudden glare on the screen.

• Temporarily disabled

It includes people having temporary cognitive impairments due to medications or broken bones.

Problems Faced by People With Disabilities

People with disabilities face serious challenges in completing their daily activities. They do not want an additional burden of inaccessible content especially when it comes to health or wellness resources. 

So, after having a quick understanding of the different disabilities and other possible beneficiaries of the accessible wellness content, below are some of their key problems:

• People with disabilities require the latest information on different health topics due to their medical issues. Hence, the first and foremost concern is the understanding of the dedicated medical content which is impossible without accessibility.

• Persons with disabilities start facing problems at the initial stage of their academics only the lack of accessible content.

• The second main challenge comes when people with disabilities try to get employment in their respective fields.

• It is difficult for persons with disabilities to improve their knowledge base and understand different concepts.

Legal and Business Implications of Accessible Wellness Resources

After understanding the need for accessible wellness resources for people with different disabilities, you may need to understand its legal and business implications.

• Legal impact

The different businesses including the medical and Healthcare sector need to offer highly accessible digital resources businesses receive different digital accessibility-based lawsuits yearly. To protect themselves from possible lawsuits, they can take advantage of accessible PDF services.

Hence, avoiding legal implications or lawsuits may not be the best reason to include accessible wellness resources but is still an important point. 

• Business Impact

People with different disabilities can be your next business opportunities. Further, their friends, relatives, or family circle makes a significant group of customers for any business. Companies which focus on disability inclusion in their business strategy are innovative and high-performing. 

Businesses that look at creating accessible wellness resources often create innovative products and services. These include the overall experience of people without disabilities and meeting the basic requirements of people with disabilities.

Accessible Health Education with PDFs

It is interesting to note that when coming to the specific wellness resources, we all feel some difficulty in understanding these documents.

These issues are faced by persons with different disabilities at a very high level. Hence, different organizations and service providers offer accessible PDFs as wellness resources. This motivates inclusive health education in different ways.

The first and most important point in creating accessible PDFs in health education is increasing the patient's satisfaction and overall experience. This brings us to the point that what type of documents can be converted into accessible PDFs for offering an inclusive health education. These include:

• Financial Disclosure

• Legal documents 

• Contracts 

• Insurance papers 

• Prescriptions 

• Medical records 

Principles of Digital Accessibility

The foundation of any digitally accessible document like accessible PDF are the following four principles:

• Perceivable

The complete interface and content should be easily detectable or visible to the users. Hence, digital content should be highly perceivable for people with disabilities like vision or hearing issues.

• Operable

The content should be easily operable using the interactive elements on the interface. These can be voice commands for people suffering from vision or cognitive issues.

• Understandable

It is important to present the wellness or healthcare content in a highly understandable form. People with disabilities must understand the purpose and meaning of the information in the proper context.

• Robust

The content for people with disabilities should be robust across different platforms and technologies. These include mobiles, laptops, and other smart devices.

What is The Significance of PDF Accessibility for Accessible Wellness Resources?

There are well-established guidelines protecting the interests of people with disabilities. Some of the popular include the following:

• The key objective of the WHO Global Disability Action Plan 2014-2021 is empowering access to health services for people with disabilities. 

• The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities protects the rights of people with disabilities. It ensures similar access to health services as people with no disabilities.

Some of the key points indicating the usefulness of accessible PDFs include the following:

• Understanding the Documents

Firstly, persons with disabilities must understand the documents or medical resources. This basic understanding covers reading, writing, and interpretation of these documents. 

The accessible PDF helps people with different vision, cognitive, or other learning disorders to understand medical resources effectively. It offers detailed scanning by different screen readers or other assistive technology for accurate text-to-speech conversion. Further, it eliminates language barriers if you’re at some other location.

• Abiding the Disability Regulations

Different regions have specific laws securing the interest of the person with different disabilities. Thus, any institute or business offering specific medical resources must comply with these regional laws to stay away from legal issues.

The accessible PDF ensures that you can include the necessary features in the medical or healthcare resources according to regional laws. So, all you need to do is understand the regional laws and regulations regarding this accessibility standard for disabled people and create PDFs accordingly.

• Ensuring High Levels of Care

Accessibility matters for disabled people. They are already facing limitations in their regular work and offering them content that is not easily interpreted adds to their worries.

The medical resources organization must ensure high levels of care and empathy for people with different disabilities. So, it is essential to make a sensitive connection with people suffering from disabilities by offering them highly accessible healthcare resources.

• Preventing Legal Issues

Lastly, no organization wants to attract lawsuits for offering inaccessible medical content to disabled people. Hence, the best solution is to enable your accessibility compliance with the accessible PDF.

Companies need to ensure that all medical content is in line with the regulations of the Americans with Disabilities Act. These include accessible PDF-qualified interpreters, large text, braille content, audio, and closed caption. The prevention of lawsuits may not be the first reason for creating accessible PDF content but it is important for the brand's reputation.

Quick Overview of PDF Accessibility

The goal of the PDF format is to ensure easy exchange and being of the digital documents including the wellness resources. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 (ISO/IEC 40500:2016) and the PDF/UA (ISO 14289-1) cover all the recommendations to make the content highly accessible. Thus, while preparing any PDF, it is essential to understand these guidelines thoroughly.

Is Your PDF Wellness Resource Accessible?

Moving towards the end, you may look for some quick features for these documents. So, below are some quick checkpoints for any accessible PDF:

• Alternative text descriptions for different non-text elements

• Document structure tags for proper reading order 

• Proper security without interfering with the assistive technology

• Title indication and document language

• Navigation aids

• Adjustable fonts for quick extraction of characters to text 

• Searchable text

Key Takeaways

Hence, it can be easily concluded that different wellness resources must remain accessible to people with disabilities at all times. One of the sure-shot methods to ensure the same is to ensure PDF accessibility in your wellness resources. 

PDF is one of the most popular and widely used digital document formats in health and wellness education. Advocating for accessible PDFs ensures that you are taking care of a large section of the population suffering from different disabilities.

Some of the key observations from the significance of accessible PDFs for accessible wellness resources are:

• PDFs must include accessibility for people with different disabilities.

• The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 (ISO/IEC 40500:2016) and the PDF/UA (ISO 14289-1) guidelines create highly accessible health and wellness content.

• PDFs are made accessible with the inclusion of different features.

• Accessible PDFs are essential in medical or wellness brochures due to easy distribution, security, and readability.