Making PDF Files Accessible

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First, a caution about using PDFs at all: Jakob Nielsen, web usability expert, has put together some compelling points about how PDFs are Still Unfit for Human Consumption. Another concern is that PDFs Are Not Ideal for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Understanding PDF Accessibility will teach you how to do some basic assessment of PDFs for accessibility, help you understand the process of creating an accessible PDF, and point you to additional resources that can help you learn more or experts who can help. What follows is an extremely abbreviated guide.

Is Your PDF Accessible?

Try to copy the text of your PDF file and paste it into a Word document. If it looks just like you see it in your PDF file, the document is accessible.

If Your Text is Not Accessible

OCR with Windows and Office (PDF) is a wonderful step-by-step guide (with pictures) to taking an inaccessible PDF file to a fully accessible text document using Acrobat Reader (the free PDF viewer) and Microsoft Office tools.

You can also upload the PDF to Google Drive, then open it with Google Docs. Google will attempt OCR on the PDF, and you can proof-read the resulting text.

A great side effect of this procedure is that you'll have a plain text version of your document, ready to be republished in any other format, including as a plain ol' user-friendly and search engine optimized web page or site.

Images, Charts, and Graphs

Remember to provide text-only descriptions of any information conveyed through images or color so that people who can't see (or can't see well) can still understand your document.

About the Author

UUA Web Team, Information Technology Services

The Web Team develops and manages UUA web sites and applications including UUA.org and UUWorld.org and several custom-built applications like our ministry search and congregational certification systems.

For more information contact .