PDF

Portable Document Format (PDF) is generally one of the most difficult electronic document formats to make accessible. However, it is a useful format for documents that need to be printed. PDF documents can be "exported" from several platforms.

Main Considerations

• PDF is difficult to make accessible. Turn PDF documents into web pages where possible. If you must use PDFs follow the resources below to make them as accessible as possible.
• Avoid scanned PDF documents. These are usually images of text and not actual text. These are completely inaccessible without running optical character recognition (OCR) software and turning them into actual text. Even then the document is not fully accessible. To check if you have an image based PDF, try to select the text. If you can not, it is not machine readable and not accessible.
• Accessible PDF documents need proper "tags" which function to identify required elements like headings, alt text for images, table structure, among other elements.
• Use the original document as much as possible to ensure accessibility. Creating a fully accessible Microsoft Word document and then converting to PDF will make the PDF document more accessible. It is much harder to fix an inaccessible PDF than fixing the original document and re-converting.
• Consider why you want to post a PDF electronically before deciding to do so. It is possible posting in the original file format like Word is just as acceptable and the original document does not need to be converted to PDF. You can post a Word document as locked or restricted so it can not be changed, a common reason why PDF is used instead.