F or most of us, the idea of accessibility invokes images of special vehicle parking spaces, ramps and elevators. Those with vision impairments know that there is much more to accessibility than a Braille sign. Anti-discrimination for the disabled has finally trickled down to the world of computing—this means PDFs too.
Here are two common PDF scenarios:
Scenario 1: Suzy Stateworker scans a printed form for the Underwater Basketweaving Workshop registration, converts it to a PDF and posts it online. A vision-impaired student visits the campus web site to register for the workshop. She opens the PDF form and turns on the “read aloud” tool in Adobe Acrobat, a tool that reads the text from PDFs. Through her headphones, the student hears, “Warning! Empty page.” She is unable to access the online PDF form and loses her chance to register for the workshop.
Scenario 2: In another office, Alan Auxiliary creates a document in a word processing program that outlines the mandatory student fee policy. The following week another visually impaired student browses the auxiliary web site to learn about the fees that he is required to pay upon enrollment. He opens the PDF and also enables the “read aloud” function. The content from this PDF is jumbled and reads out of order. The student is not able to access the PDF in a comprehensive way due to its lack of structure.
PDFs can be made accessible with a bit of patience, but the core of PDF accessibility begins with popular desktop applications, such as Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign. Both applications have the capability of adding alternate text to images and read order structure to documents. Even scanned hard copies can be converted into accessible PDFs by using a built-in OCR (Optical Character Recognition) function in Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional. —Keira Dooley is webmaster and art director for the Division of Student Services.
To learn how to make accessible PDFs, visit the online Adobe tutorial at www.csulb.edu/students/resources.
