Chapter and Verse Blog

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Did you know that if the source document isn't accessible then the PDF document won't be either?

Organisations are often compelled by law to publish documentation to their target audiences. Many of these documents are very long and were originally prepared in Microsoft Word. Content authors given this task often simply convert the original file to PDF, upload it to the server, and link to it from a web page. Job done!

But not so fast... This is good practice only as long as the resulting PDF is accessible and can be read by assistive technology. Impaired users, such as the blind who use screen-reading software, must also be able to access these documents.

This means that not only must content authors ensure that the content on their website is accessible, but that the linked PDF documents are too.

The process for making a PDF accessible is known as "tagging" and is very similar to the coding process for a web page. Just as the headings, tables, forms, and links on a web page require semantic coding, so do the same elements in a PDF.

This is made much easier if the originating document has been made accessible in the first place. For instance, the 2010 version of Microsoft Word has a built-in accessibility checker.

So organisations who are still using Word 2003/2007 would do well to heed this fact. They should ensure that content authors who are converting Word documents to PDF have access to this latest version of Word, be it on a spare laptop or a single dedicated PC. They can then run the accessibility checker on any source document prior to converting it to a PDF.

Then, provided they use software such as Adobe Acrobat Pro's PDF Maker to convert to PDF, they will be going a long way towards meeting the WCAG 2.0 Guidelines.

by Penny Everett, VerseOne Accessibility Specialist

Indirect discrimination is against the law—even if it isn't intentional!

So, I can hear you say, what exactly is "indirect discrimination"?

It is best explained by giving an example:

A legal services provider places a large number of legal documents in portable document format (PDF) on its website. None of the PDFs are able to be read by a screen reader because the text has been saved in graphic format.

Now, let's face it, this company probably isn't aware that they had done anything wrong. However, they have left themselves open should a visually impaired user decide to take action because they cannot access important legal information.

If the legal services company were to be taken to court, they would have to justify why they had committed this offence. Unfortunately for them, a court of law will not accept the argument that the organisation doesn't have sufficient staff to undertake the conversion of these documents.

The moral of this story is that you need to ensure that all your PDFs are accessible. If you realise that some of your legacy documents are not, then you need to take action immediately and at the very least:

• add a statement on your website to ask users to contact you if they experience difficulty accessing any document on your website.

The next thing to do would be to look into training a member of staff to ensure that all your PDFs are accessible. Simply converting a document to PDF does not necessarily make it accessible, as the above example demonstrates.

Act Statutory Code of Practice on services, public functions and associations (PDF 908KB)