Category: PDFs

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Accessibility Care Package

colorful stripes

This accessibility care package is a set of trainings and tools that can help with identifying what steps you can take to start creating accessible content from the beginning. Make your native file documents accessible from the start to get PDFs that are better for screen readers. Use checklists before publishing content to ensure your content accessibility.

I’m creating a presentation about accessibility that fills a gap I noticed in the current training patterns around digital accessibility. For the past five years, I would attend conference sessions, presentations, and online trainings about accessibility but very few presenters were showing the audience what it is like to experience content through assistive technologies. I’ve got a recorded interview lined up for my presentation so that my audience can hear screen readers announce content. As a followup to my presentation, I’m creating this accessibility care package for people new to accessibility.

Introductory

W3C Web Accessibility intro video.

WebAim’s WCAG 2.1 checklist 

W3C’s WCAG At a Glance

Tools

Use the WAVE (Firefox or Chrome Extension) toolbar to run a check for website errors on a page by page basis.

Test your text color values for color contrast ratios. It gives you a simple pass or fail for different text sizes. This applies to printed documents, too.

Site Improve’s free toolkit. Site Improve offers a paid software, but they also have these free checker tools such as a Chrome extension and a color contrast checker.

Training

How to write alt text. There are ways and ways to approach alt text. I don’t have any definitive answers for this, except that you can make it brief. If an image is text heavy, it is better practice to re-describe it in the body copy, or use a screen reader only class to type out the content just for screen readers.

Site Improve’s Basics of Web Accessibility. I use this product at work because my agency pays for the license. They are an international company so this blog post includes technical standards from other countries.

Section 508.gov Web Training. There are many lessons in here!

MS Word Tutorials

Make your Microsoft Word document accessible. This tutorial from Microsoft offers many instructions for many different platforms.

Customize or create new styles in MS Word. Use your styles pane to designate headings!

Google Docs

Make Your Document or Presentation More Accessible. From Google Docs documentation.

InDesign Tutorials

Add Paragraph Styles: InDesign. When you set up your file with paragraph styles it makes it easier to map styles to tags for your export to PDF.

How to map a Style to a Tag in InDesign. It would be really great if your InDesign section headers and major content headers could have the tags H1, H2, H3. That way, when you export to PDF, the digital version will have semantic markup and the bookmarks should be automatic from document structure.

Creating accessible PDFs from an InDesign file.

Adobe Acrobat

PDFs are not automatically accessible. You need to run a few tools in the full version of Acrobat to get full accessibility. Unfortunately, the free program Reader will not do these things.

Adobe: Accessibility features in Acrobat

Reading order tool

Creating accessible PDFs

Technical Standards

W3C Recommendation for WCAG 2.1 State content and state-funded companies need to comply with WCAG.

Section 508. Federal agency content and federally-funded companies need to comply with section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.

W3C WAI: Making the web accessible.

Citations

These are sources I used to create my presentation on accessible content.

Beyonce’s website got sued… Entrepreneur

What is Color Blindess? Colblindor

Bringing Assistive Technology to Patrons. American Libraries

Motor Disabilities. WebAIM

Dyslexie Font.com

Plain Language.gov

Constructing a POUR website. WebAIM

CKEditor4 Accessibility Checker Plugin.

WAI-ARIA Overview. W3C

By the way, I did write a term paper about accessibility while earning my bachelor’s degree in technical communication. See my portfolio accessibility page to read it.

Interview with Curtis Chong, full excerpt

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File Management

When working on the web, coders or content managers often see the request to ‘post this pdf on our page…’. A wise one will ask, ‘Is this a file replacement or is it new? Shall I delete the outdated file or keep it for archives?’ File management can be a bear for content managers.

Think of a bucket that is mounted so high you cannot see inside it, or it has a lid that won’t let you see inside the bucket. Let’s pretend the bucket is your file upload directory in your content management system (CMS). Some CMS’s make you first upload into a media library and then get the link to the file from there so you can link it on your page. But other CMS’s have a file uploader right on the edit page pane. Every time you upload a .docx or .pdf or .xlsx document into a page it also goes into the bucket.

You can show or hide the file from the page, but it still lives in the bucket, out of your sight.

via GIPHY

Out of Sight But Not Out of the Engines

Search engines can find those files! Even if you have un-linked the file from the page, it still lives in the bucket of files that search engines can index and keep in their short term memory, called cache.

That is why I do the tedious thing, the hard thing, and take the longer road. It’s boring and tedious to go cherrypick files for deletion, but if you’d like to save yourself some headaches further down the road, keep your directories clean in the present.

Depending on your workflow, you may need to ask your internet host to delete files for you, or your coder, or your IT team. Sometimes it is not obvious how to get a printout of what is in that bucket, and sometimes you just plain can’t get a listing of all the files in your upload directory. So each time you replace a file, make sure the old one is either deleted or overwritten.

Website Emergency!

This came up for me at work this quarter. A user had done a search and found an obsolete file on Google. It posed a fraud risk for the financial division, and they asked to have it removed asap. In my workflow, only the person who originally uploaded a file can delete it fully from the server. Since the file was over six years old and it was unknown who uploaded it, I needed to place a trouble ticket with my host to have it removed.

Next time you get a request to ‘please post this pdf on our page…,’ know that this is only half of the request! Your next question is ‘shall I delete the old file?’ And that is document management.