Defining PDF Accessibility

PDF accessibility involves creating PDF files in a way that ensures people with disabilities can access and understand the content and information within them.

It involves incorporating features and structures that enable people with disabilities to perceive, navigate, and comprehend the content contained within PDF documents. Ensuring PDF Accessibility is important to foster inclusion, comply with legal requirements, and ensure everyone has equal access to information.

What is accessibility?

“Accessibility” means usable by all people, including those with disabilities or who use assistive technology. Accessible documents must be readable by assistive technology, as well as understandable and usable on various technologies and platforms. Tags play an important role in this process because they provide information about elements in the document, such as headings, images, tables, lists, and links. It also helps assistive technology users understand the order and hierarchy of document content. 

Requirements for Ensuring an Accessible PDF

  • Tagging PDF
  • Setting the language of the document or content
  • Setting the correct reading order
  • Marking the appropriate heading structure
  • Highlight tables, whether complex or simple. 
  • Mark numbered, bulleted, or nested lists
  • Providing the image description
  • Marking elements as artifacts

Here are 10 ideas for enhancing PDF accessibility services:

  1. Automatic Tagging:

Implement automatic tagging of elements like headings, tables, figures, and lists. This improves navigation for screen readers and other assistive technologies.

  1. Semantic Structure:

Ensure the proper semantic structure of the PDF document. This allows assistive technologies to understand the relationships between different parts of the content.

  1. Alternative Text Descriptions:

Provide alternative text descriptions for all non-text content like images, charts, and graphs. This conveys the information to users who cannot visually perceive the content.

  1. Keyboard Accessibility:

Guarantee that all interactive elements in the PDF are accessible using the keyboard. This enables users who rely on keyboard navigation to interact with the document effectively.

  1. Logical Reading Order:

Maintain a logical reading order for the content. This ensures that assistive technologies present the information in a way that makes sense to the user.

  1. Color Contrast:

Use sufficient color contrast between text and background. This is crucial for users with visual impairments to distinguish the information.

  1. Font Selection:

Select easy-to-read fonts like sans-serif fonts and avoid using overly decorative or small fonts.

  1. Language Support:

Embed language information within the PDF to allow assistive technologies to properly pronounce the text and offer language-specific features.

  1. Document Repair Tools:

Develop and integrate tools within PDF accessibility services that can automatically repair common accessibility issues in existing PDFs.

  1. Accessibility Checkers:

Provide accessibility checkers that identify and flag potential accessibility barriers within the PDF document. This allows creators to address these issues before sharing the document.

Benefits of Outsourcing PDF Accessibility Services to Super DTP

Outsourcing your accessibility services to us offers many benefits, including:

ADA/508 Compliance

Our accessible PDF service strictly adheres to global accessibility standards and guidelines. These include WCAG 2.0 & 2.1 guidelines and PDF/UA (Universal Access, or ISO 14289).

Experience

We have real experience in making all types of PDFs accessible. This ensures a cost-effective, high-quality, and compliant solution.

Wide Range of Documents

We will help you with diverse PDF requirements. This includes business reports, publication forms, user manuals, marketing brochures, textbooks, etc.

How To Convert PDF Accessibility?

If you want to convert your files to PDF to make them accessible, we recommend that you choose a source document that supports PDF accessibility and convert it to PDF accordingly. These documents are created in two main ways. B. Generated from scratch. (the information is retrieved from a database), or it is first created as a source document (for example, someone creates  Microsoft Word and converts it to PDF). 

If you want to transform the accessibility of your PDFs, you should know that the most popular tool, Microsoft Office, has excellent accessibility across the board and continues to improve with each new version released. there is. That’s why Word documents take into account details like headings, contrast, document titles, lists, and anything else important for accessibility. Once converted to PDF, you can clean it up in Acrobat.

Conclusion:

In short, PDF remediation solves the problem for people with disabilities by adding digital labels and tags to PDF documents.

PDF proofing services are important to improve user experience and are available on all devices.This is a way to address content clutter issues and improve the color contrast of content in  PDF files. SuperDTP Ltd is a specialized Desktop Publishing agency located in Gabrovo Bulgaria, offering book publishing, multilingual DTP, and E-learning localization services to translation agencies and localization companies worldwide! Check our services at www.superdtp.com or contact us at dtp.bulgaria@gmail.com for further details.