In my note to the chairs, last week, I noted that even though our college-wide accessibility score is about 73.5%, that percentage drops much lower if we consider the accessibility of files posted in our courses:
Yeah, that’s … not great.
And yes, the bulk of that not great percentage has to do with PDFs. So we need to talk about PDFs and what to do about them. So let’s talk about PDFs. I have posted about PDFs before but I want to reiterate a few things.
If you have taken the workshop on creating accessible PDFs from the accessibility consultant that was hired last Spring for that training purpose, then you know that creating accessible PDFs varies from hard to impossible. Part of me suspects that the consultant was more trying to discourage us from using PDFs by saying that “oh sure, you can make this PDF accessible. Just follow these 25 steps that will be more painful than a root canal. And then, do these 25 verification steps that will make you lose any sense of happiness.” I mean, his slides all looked like this:
So the first question you should ask yourself is “does this document need to be a PDF?” According to the consultant, the only time a document needs to be a PDF is if it requires a signature. If not, then you should not use PDFs.
When considering the issues with PDFs, it’s useful to start from where you got your document in the first place.
Did you create this pdf from your own documents?
If the PDF is a document you created (in Word or PowerPoint), then you should use that original format, instead of PDF. Exporting as PDF does not give you anything that .docx or .pptx give you (again, unless you need a signature). However, you want to make sure that you did an accessibility check in Word or PowerPoint (or whichever other app you use) and fixed the issues the checker finds. And if you love tables as much as I do, bookmark this page on how to make then accessible in Word.
If you want to spare yourself even more work, you can use the WYSIWYG interface in Blackboard, using Ultra Docs. Putting your content there pretty much guarantees a high accessibility score.
That’s the easiest case though.
If you did not create the PDF, where did you find it?
Is it, for instance, an article you downloaded from the databases to which we have access to the Library? If yes, let’s work out an example. I downloaded a PDF from a research article I used to use in one of my courses. It’s not that old so I assumed it would be ok, right?
Oh.
And you can see that the big issue with this document is that it is not tagged. However, you should always click on the All Issues button so you can see the breakdown of everything wrong with your document, along with the % increase on accessibility score with each remeditation (in other words, how much bang for your accessibility buck do you get for each issue you fix). If you click on All Issues, you get this:
As you can see, the lack of tags is the big issue. The other two can be easily fixed by Ally but for very little gain in accessibility. So for the two small issues, just click on Fix Here, set the language or add a title and your score will increase minimally. Now, you may tell yourselves, “well, there’s a Fix Here button for tagging as well so what’s the big deal?” Here is what happens when you click on that Fix Here button:
Do NOT be deceived by that colorful and innocuous “What happens next” that gives you hope that everything will be OK, BECAUSE IT WILL NOT. But I naively clicked on Generate Tags.
Oh.
That’s right, it’s a scanned PDF. It’s not OCR’ed. Ally interprets every block of content as an image (without description). Now you can see why this document is inaccessible because what would a text reader do with this?
So if you ever scanned a file to PDF, saved it, and uploaded it in your courses, this is probably what it looks like to Ally. Or if you downloaded a PDF directly from the Internet, that is probably also the main issue.
Side note:
What to do then?
If you got an article from one of the Library databases, then, you have a solution. You do not need the PDF at all. Find your article in the database again and click on Access Options or Share options.
Let’s start with the Share options:
As you can see, the Share option allows you to create a permalink that you can post in your courses instead of uploading a PDF that’s gonna sink your accessibility score.
The Access options are even better. If you click on Online Full Text above, you get the following:
The top right toolbar is where the good stuff is.
- provides translations in a variety of language.
- provides a table of content (great for screen readers).
- provides text to speech.
- provides specific accessibility options.
That way, your students can choose the modality in which to engage with the article. And they can download a PDF, if that’s their preferred option.
Of course, that’s only if you use the Library databases.
But what do you do if your PDF is something you just downloaded from the Internet? Well, my first recommendation would be to go have a chat with your division library faculty and see if they can find an accessible copy somewhere, and if not, if they can find similar content in an accessible format.
But what if none of this works? That’s a topic for future posts. The point of this post here was that there is a lot you can do to spare yourselves the really painful remediation that a lot PDFs require.
