ADA Honest Discussion: Accessible PDFs

Lynn Wehrman: Welcome everyone. This is another ADA Web Rule Honest Discussion, and today we’re focusing on PDF strategies. My name is Lynn Wehrman, President and Founder at Digital Accessibility by WeCo. We’re a mission-based company of digital accessibility professionals — accessibility specialists and UX testers who all live with disabilities. We are bringing you this series as part of our mission of free information.

Lynn Wehrman: On the panel today we have Sarah Goldman with the City of Pasadena, and Marisela Tavares, one of our accessible document specialists here at WeCo.

Sarah Goldman: Hi everybody. My name is Sarah Goldman. I work as the accessibility coordinator for the City of Pasadena. My job is to make sure that all of our city departments, services, programs, facilities — everything we do as local government — is accessible to people with disabilities, and that we’re following the rules set by federal, state, and local governments.

Marisela Tavares: Thank you, Lynn. My name is Marisela Tavares. I serve on the WeCo team as an accessible document specialist, supporting clients with their accessibility needs specifically around documents. Before that, I served 17 years in the Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration, the last five to six years as the web and Section 508 manager for the Office of Infrastructure, where we produced hundreds of deliverables per year. I am an accessible document specialist certified by the International Association of Accessibility Professionals, and also a DHS Trusted Tester.

Lynn Wehrman: Today we’re going to talk about why we create so many PDFs, when documents might be archived, when an HTML version might be more appropriate, and the tools and strategies that yield the best results for accessibility — while also making sure we’re doing legal due diligence.

Marisela Tavares: In a nutshell, document accessibility is about making a document perceivable and understandable — ensuring people are able to navigate and interact with the content no matter their abilities. We want to make sure that people with disabilities are able to interact with document content in the same way as people without disabilities. The way we do that is by providing structure to our documents. In PDF specifically, we do that by tagging content with semantic tags that provide meaning to screen reader users — tags for headings, lists, and tables — organized in a logical reading order.

Marisela Tavares: We also need to keep in mind that whenever we use non-text content like images and graphs, we need to provide alternative descriptions. We need to consider color contrast, use of color, and descriptive links so that people who cannot use a mouse can still interact with the document using only a keyboard.

Lynn Wehrman: When I was doing digital accessibility work for the state of Minnesota, I didn’t realize that people who couldn’t see our webpages or documents encountered them in a very different way. When you’re having something read aloud to you and you don’t see it, you still need to be able to peruse a document the way a visual user would. Without semantic headings and properly identified lists, a screen reader user has to listen to an entire page read out to them to find something that might be at the bottom. But if the document is correctly tagged, they can command their screen reader to read just the headings so they can skip to what they need. Document accessibility is really about building convenience and independence for people.

Sarah Goldman: When we first learned about the rule, it was overwhelming to think about the breadth of our website — especially the number of documents, not only those that live on the website, but that staff create every day and every week. We realized that there are hundreds of staff-level content creators across our agency who are uploading, on average, 300 to 400 documents per week to the website. We had to develop a strategic approach to prioritization, focusing first on the documents that matter most to residents and carry the most legal risk.

Lynn Wehrman: When it comes to document accessibility especially, accessibility is really about organizational control. A great example of this is Metro Transit of the Twin Cities, which has a web governance board where major changes to the website go through a monthly meeting. Content changes are vetted and approved through this board of representatives from different departments, and they added accessibility as a part of that process — giving them a lot of control over making sure things were done in an accessible way.

Marisela Tavares: In terms of organizational control, training is something that always helps. Establishing a communication plan — sending out monthly emails with information about how to improve document accessibility — makes a difference. Some people won’t look at it, but others will pay attention and learn. That constant communication definitely helps with risk reduction and credibility, and providing that accessibility to the public is something that will pay off in the future.

Lynn Wehrman: A question came in from Andrea asking about simulators that would allow a team to navigate a poorly designed, non-accessible PDF so they can experience firsthand what it’s like. We actually caution against simulations. What simulations typically do is demonstrate what it is like when someone becomes newly disabled — and that gives a very narrow, inaccurate view of people with disabilities as being helpless. People who live with disabilities learn their assistive technology over time and become expert users. Their experience will never truly be simulated unless you live with a disability. Instead, we recommend looking to people who live with disabilities and asking them to show you what they experience. We have videos on our YouTube channel, and there are many others available there as well.

Sarah Goldman: For one-person teams tackling this — I’m an office of one. I’m the only accessibility coordinator in the city. My advice is to identify your allies within your entity. They may have different motivations — perhaps it’s folks from your legal team who want to reduce liability, or marketing teams who want effective public communication, or people who are disabled themselves or have disabled friends and family. Find the people where you have shared goals and bring them on to your team. Even though it may be just you whose job it is to do this, there are probably lots of people within your organization who care. Find who those people are and recruit them to your cause.

Lynn Wehrman: Thank you so much to Sarah Goldman, Accessibility Coordinator for the City of Pasadena, and Marisela Tavares, IAP Accessible Document Specialist and part of the WeCo document team, for being here today. This will be released as a video shortly so you can share it with others. Thanks so much, and have a great afternoon.