PDF Accessibility

Make your PDFs Accessible.

What Does that Mean to You?

It is important to know that 20% of people surfing the internet (link it to https://webaim.org/intro/) have some kind of disability, one of them visual.

This means that if you are willing to reach a wider audience, your documents have to be accessible for visually-impaired people. MTD Localization is here to support your efforts to make your PDFs accessible for everyone, in the most effective manner and with a budget-friendly strategy.

Screen Readers and PDF accessibility:

For assistive technology to work well, your documents should be well prepared and fully accessible. This means documents will be read by screen readers, and accordingly some modifications have to be implemented, including the following:

  • The document should be tagged if it doesn’t.
  • Table of content and bookmarks should be accurate and linked to the relevant section.
  • Images and graphics need to be presented with alternative text that describes them well.
  • Forms should also have some kind of explanation of what kind of information you want user to add.
  • Color contrast of text and font size should be suitable for screen readers.

The documents you receive will match the look and appearance of your original documents. However, there will be a layer -which won’t be visible to you- that contains data and information which assistive technology can read out in a convenient way for people with disabilities.

 

“Tags” will represent:

  • Headings
  • Paragraphs
  • Lists
  • Tables
  • Formulas
  • Links
  • Bookmarks
  • Table of Contents, linked to its pages
  • Identification of Headers and Footers
  • Descriptive Text for Graphics, Images, and Charts
  • Form Fields, which contain instructions
  • Color Contrast and Font Size; ones that meet basic requirements

How We Test and Remediate PDFs?

Stage 1: Automated Testing Tools:

  • PDF Accessibility Checker (PAC)
  • Adobe Acrobat Pro Accessibility Checker

Stage 2: Manual Processes

The results of any automated tool need to be checked manually to ensure that any warnings or failures are detected.

Stage 3: Most Common Screen Readers, such as:

  • Adobe Acrobat Read Out Loud tool
  • NVDA
  • JAWS

Accessible PDFs Criteria

MTD Localization uses checklists to meet PDF/UA and WCAG 2.0 AA requirements and Accessible Electronic Documents Community of Practice (AED COP) to ensure perfect and true quality of the final accessible documents.