How to Make PDFs Accessible | Episode 6: Fullerton College

Welcome to episode six on community college PDF accessibility. Today, we focus on Fullerton Community College’s document “Points of Interest and Clarification Architecture.”

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 7, Episode 8, Episode 9, Episode 10, Episode 11, Episode 12, Episode 13, Episode 14, Episode 15, Episode 16, and Episode 17 in our PDF Accessibility Community College Series.

Start with a quick review of the tags panel. The PDF had several blank tags and an unclear tag structure. Poor tagging provides inaccurate information to screen readers which disrupts accessibility.

In this case, the issues found suggested the document was converted from a Microsoft Word document, without proper accessibility checks.

Key Issues from This Episode

Run the auto tag feature to improve the PDF’s accessibility:

• The auto-tagger did a great job of organizing the content into proper tags like paragraphs (p tags) and headings (h1, h2, h3 tags). Lists were also formatted correctly.
• Auto-tagger isn’t a perfect process, so we manually adjusted a few tags after running it. For example, h2 tags were changed to paragraph tags and the inconsistent headings for the Fall and Spring sections were changed to h3 for uniformity.
• Finally, for better identification and searchability, update the PDF’s metadata, like the title and author.

After completing these initial fixes, the accessibility checker identified more PDF accessibility challenges:

• Identify and manually correct misused tags. We found a figure tag that was meant to be a paragraph tag and corrected it.
• Page numbers were not tagged so we manually selected each page number and tagged them as paragraphs.

• Also, missing fonts were embedded and annotations for links were fixed in order to meet PDF accessibility standards.

Multiple runs of the PAC checker also revealed several errors:

• The structure tree showed several inappropriate uses of span tags which is a common error plaguing our PDF College Series!
• Identify and correct role mapping problems by removing non-standard types, which show errors in the PAC checker. For example, our PDF contained ‘style spans’ which were not standard so we manually searched the tags panel and changed each to a regular span tag to eliminate the errors.

Troubleshooting these issues is a trial-and-error process. Remember to keep saving your PDF. Repeating tasks requiring absolute accuracy takes serious mental effort and is not foolproof.

Download the Free Section 508 Checklist for PDF Accessibility:

PRO-TIP: To change multiple tags at once, hold down the control key and select your tags for editing. Next, open up the document properties, and change the ‘type’. Be careful! A single mis-click can deselect all your chosen tags, which then requires the process to be repeated.

This PDF had several accessibility issues. We used both automated and manual interventions including ensuring proper tagging, updating metadata, embedding fonts, and correcting ‘span’ styles in order to make it accessible

Remember, I can be your accessibility expert. 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!