No, PDFs are not dead
You may have seen some communication urging people to stop using PDFs for accessibility reasons.
It’s a bit more nuanced than that. Let me review different situations and what you can do so that your documents are accessible.
The worst-case scenario
Let’s say you have a really, really old PDF, a document or text that is classic or foundational in your field. That document may have been scanned years (decades?) ago with now outdated technology. Chances are, that PDF is not accessible. And yet, its content is important, and you really want your students to be exposed to it.
My recommendation: check out the Library databases to see if there is a more accessible copy there.
In general, I would recommend that you use the Library databases permalinks instead of posting a PDF in your course. Why? Because the Library databases come already equipped with all sorts of accessibility options (PDF and HTML downloads, sometimes text to speech, for instance).
If your really old document is not in the databases, I would then recommend talking to your area librarian to see if they can locate a better version.
Recent PDF Extracted from the Databases
If you have a more recent PDF that you extracted from the databases, it should be accessible, but I would suggest my recommendation above: link to the database instead of uploading a PDF to your course.
Note: those database links will not deprecate (as long as the College pays for the database subscriptions).
PDFs You Created in Word or Google Doc and You Still Have the Original Document
If you have a somewhat old PDF you created a while ago from a word processing app and you still have the original, it might not be accessible.
My recommendation: re-open your document in Word. Make sure you’re using the latest Word extension. Open your document and re-save in the latest Word format. Then, save it again as PDF.
PDFs You Created in Word or Google Doc but You Don’t Have the Original Document
In this case, use Word to convert from PDF to Word. Make any edits you want, save in the latest Word format, and then, re-save as PDF.
Final Thoughts
Because we are under a strict deadline to have all our course materials accessible, now would be a good time to go through your courses and double-check that your documents, especially PDFs, are accessible and progressively update them all as needed.
Also, not everything needs to be a PDF. I like PDFs but I only use them for documents that students are going to use as is, like the syllabus, or specific handouts where the formatting matters and I don’t want students to risk messing them up. For documents that students will need to modify, stick to a more easily editable format.
