PDF Accessibility

colorful stripes

I found a fantastic blog post by Adobe about accessibility champion Dax Castro’s business CHAX Training and Consulting. I’ve been aware of Dax for about five years now, due to his free tutorials about PDF accessibility via InDesign during the livestreams of the Adobe Max conference. I encourage everybody who makes PDFs that get posted on the web to learn from Dax and his business partner Chad Celius. I have watched and re-watched several of their recorded training videos, and I find them so valuable!

Read the blog post: An accessibility champion’s journey to digital inclusion using Adobe’s transformative solutions

WordPress Accessibility Day

I watched a few of the talks during the previous livestream of WordPress Accessibility Day, and I found them so intriguing that I volunteered to emcee at the October 2024 event. I’ve been approved for a shift, and I have to say I’m pretty excited about the T-Shirt this year.

The T-Shirt says “:focus – It’s a feature, not a bug,” and it is meant to educate content creators that the highlight on elements that happens when one tabs through a webpage are meant to be there, so one should not remove the :focus element from one’s CSS.

Read the WordPress Accessibility Day News Feed.

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 Shall I delete the outdated file or keep it for archives?’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.

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.

Catching Up

Since I have left this website alone to fend for itself for over a year, a lot has happened. Today I’m home from work because of a blizzard, so I have updated my PHP and WordPress versions. I added security to the protocol, which means the web address should now start with https rather than http. It’s fitting to come in and clean up the site back-end after Google published a Google Doodle on the 30th anniversary of the world wide web. Tim Berners Lee submitted a proposal for the http protocol 30 years ago! Let’s see, what was I doing then? In 1989 I was a freshman at a college in Maryland and I was frustrated with computers…I had no way of knowing I would end up managing websites and website content.

I’m now working on state website content full time and have precious little time to focus on this personal blog. I’ve also let go of Adobe Premiere and Dreamweaver so I may not be able to do video tutorials until I find time to learn another video editing tool. Adobe is so pricey that I pared it down to a Photoshop and Lightroom-only subscription.

STC

I’ve upgraded my membership in the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and I anticipate attending their annual summit this year. This year it is time to invest in my own career growth! Working on the web can be rewarding. I will focus on attending workshops about user experience and content strategy.

A Bit of Nostalgia

I’ve been working on the web for about 20 years now. In 1999 I learned Dreamweaver back when Macromedia owned it. The web was a wide-open field of possibilities. My first job earning money for website services? I freelanced for a woman who wanted to build and sell a screensaver for people who liked watching soap operas in 1999 or 2000. So I used Photoshop and Director to make a little self-playing slide show of all the soap opera stars she told me to put in. I didn’t recognize a one of them because I never watched soaps! I haven’t thought of that in a decade. I wonder where that project is… I don’t think I could even find a screenshot of it. I remember I had made it look like it was a reel of film moving left to right, with the little holes at top and bottom. Each frame was a different character from a show. And I suppose she offered the zipped file for sale on her website so users could buy it and install it to be their screensaver.