PDF Accessibility: Community College Series

Welcome to episode 13 on community college PDF accessibility. Today, we focus on the accessibility woes encountered while exploring American River College’s website.

Video Guide

If you’re interested in the real-life practice and nuances of document remediation, here are Episode 1, Episode 2, Episode 3, Episode 4, Episode 5, Episode 6, Episode 7, Episode 8, Episode 9, Episode 10, Episode 11, Episode 12, Episode 14, Episode 15, Episode 16, and Episode 17 in our PDF Accessibility Community College Series.

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Identifying PDF Accessibility Issues

Upon visiting the American River College website, we found PDFs labeled as “accessible”. However, upon inspection, we discovered numerous accessibility issues. These issues included:

Incorrect tagging: The document had all headings marked as such, leading to a disorganized structure.
Unordered list misalignment: List elements were incorrectly tagged, leading to an illogical reading order.
Despite the inaccurate accessibility checker results from Adobe Acrobat’s built-in checker, manual inspection revealed significant accessibility shortcomings in the document.

Solving PDF Accessibility Challenges

To address these issues, we employed various corrective measures:

Manual tagging: Using keyboard shortcuts, adjust tags to ensure proper structure, convert headings to appropriate tags, and restructure unordered lists.
Artifact designation: Mark blank containers as artifacts to prevent them from affecting the document’s accessibility.
Font embedding: Embed fonts to ensure consistency across different platforms and devices.

Embed missing fonts in Adobe Acrobat: from Use Print Production, Preflight, Embed Missing Fonts

Bounding box addition: Add bounding boxes and layout attributes to figures to improve document structure.
Metadata and alternate descriptions: Link annotations and set PDF UA identifiers to enhance metadata accessibility.

Create link annotations in Adobe Acrobat: from Use Print Production, Preflight, Create Content entry for Link annotations.

The conversion process from Word to PDF likely contributed to the document’s accessibility shortcomings. Despite minor oversights, addressing these issues required considerable effort and attention to detail.

Although the journey to accessibility may pose challenges, it’s crucial for ensuring inclusivity for all users. Nevertheless, despite encountering numerous hurdles, our dedication to accessibility persevered. Through rectifying tagging discrepancies and addressing structural issues, we successfully transformed a problematic document into an accessible one.

Download the Free Section 508 Checklist for PDF Accessibility:

Takeaways

Manual inspection is crucial. Automated accessibility checkers may not catch all issues, necessitating thorough manual review.
Proper tagging is paramount. Correctly structured documents enhance readability and navigation for users of assistive technologies.
Continuous improvement is key. Accessibility is an ongoing process, and constant vigilance is necessary to address evolving challenges.

Let me be your champion for inclusion. I offer tailored solutions (and self-paced courses!) to ensure your documents meet and exceed compliance expectations. For more detailed insights, tutorials, and in-depth discussions on accessibility and related topics, don’t forget to check out my YouTube channel: The Accessibility Guy on YouTube. Subscribe for regular updates!