Are PDFs More Important Than Web Accessibility?
Posted by rbwatson1 on November 17, 2009
We recently did an audit of a website where probably close to 99% of all the information it contained was in downloadable documents, mostly PDFs. These documents contained a lot of the stuff you’d usually find on a website, structured text, data tables, application forms, complex diagrams, graphs and other images. None of those we looked at were accessible. We wondered what we should advise the client to do about it. The PDFs weren’t structured or tagged, so a user of assistive technologies would find them problematic. For a screen reader user, the structure would be difficult to make out, data tables difficult to understand, information in diagrams and graphs completely unavailable and application forms impossible to fill in. So even if the HTML pages were made fully accessible, or if the PDFs could be acquired by some other means, 99% of the information and functionality on the website would still be unavailable to those users. In this case, it could be argued that the PDFs are more important for accessibility than the ‘web accessibility’.
Are PDFs More Important Than Web Accessibility?
(author unknown)
Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:39:59 GMT
