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Tip #1

INDEX OF TIPS

Creating Accessible PDF (Portable Document Format) Documents

Adobe Acrobat is a wonderful program that allows you to create portable versions of documents, which can be shared electronically and printed by anyone who has the free Acrobat Reader. The 508 regulations do not prohibit you from posting PDF files on your Web site. However, there are steps you must take to ensure accessibility.

Preparing Your Document

Use the step-by-step guide How To Create Accessible Adobe PDF Files. This guide should be read before you write the document that is going to be converted into PDF. It stresses the importance of "[a]uthoring the original documents so that they contain not just content (such as the text in the document) but also information about the structure of the content (such as how the text flows within the page and from page to page)."

At the first orientation session, we discussed the difference between structure and presentation in HTML documents. The distinction is just as important when you are creating a document in Microsoft Word (or WordPerfect, etc.). Adobe's booklet states:

These same requirements apply to any type of publishing environment, regardless of the file format or application. If you want to make it possible for people with screen readers to navigate documents correctly, the underlying structural information must be present.

In other words, we should get into the habit of thinking about how each element in a document functions, not how it looks. For example, if asked to describe the line "Preparing Your Document" (above), I would say, "It is a level-three section heading, marked up with the tag H3." If I said, "It is bold, dark-purply text in large Arial font," I would be talking about presentation, not structure. Visual cues like "bold" and "large font" mean nothing to a blind person's screen reader (or to Lynx, for that matter), whereas structural cues like the H3 tag will help that person know where she is my document.

When preparing your document:

Outline, creating a consistent hierarchy of section headers, subheaders, etc.
Use your word-processing application's structural formatting options (such as HEADING styles, indented quotations styles, and numbered-list tools) to organize and format your document in a logical manner.
Caption non-text elements.
Avoid using carriage-returns to force page breaks and spaces to control indentation and alignment.
Refer to Adobe's Guide for tips and advice.

Scanning: if you are scanning a printed document for conversion to PDF, you will need to use an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) program (such as OmniPage Pro) to convert the document to text-and-pictures first. Then save it as a word-processing document and follow all the steps above. Otherwise you will simply have a scanned picture of a printed page, which is not accessible to anyone.

If you or your contractors are using page-layout programs such as Quark and PageMaker to produce complex documents that will be posted on your site as PDFs, there are additional things to consider; see http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/2000/12/pdf.html.

Converting your Document

Use Acrobat 5.0 to create your PDFs. Acrobat 5.0 has important features which are not present in previous versions of the software; for instance, it includes tools to help optimize Adobe PDF files for accessibility, including an accessibility checker and a tags palette.

For long documents, provide a table of contents or index and include bookmarks and links within the document to aid readers in navigation.

Posting your Document

When you link to a PDF file, let your visitors know that it is a PDF file, and provide a link (in the same part of the page) to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/alternate.html so that they can download the Acrobat Reader plug-in.

PDF is intended as an alternative (portable, printable) format for information, not as a replacement for HTML, which all Web users can read without a plug-in. Provide an HTML version of any document that is posted in PDF on your site. If you have PDF documents already on your site, and cannot get an HTML version up right away, at least provide users a link to http://access.adobe.com/simple_form.html, where they can try to convert the PDF on the fly using Adobe's web-based form.

For the latest information on Adobe Acrobat and accessibility, see access.adobe.com.

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