PDFs and Digital Accessibility

Why is PDF accessibility important?

Inaccessible PDFs and PDF forms can pose formidable if not prohibitive barriers for people with disabilities. In a world-wide survey of screen-reader users, 75.1% indicate that PDFs are very or somewhat likely to pose significant accessibility issues.

Fortunately, there are many ways to ensure that the digital content we publish is fully accessible to all users, whether that means exploring more sustainable, accessible formats or doing the work necessary to make our PDF content fully accessible to all users.
 

Best practices for PDF files

Ask yourself, does this need to be a PDF? In many cases the information you need to share can instead be converted to HTML content (a web page or a web form). 

If you do need to create a PDF, be sure to start with an accessible document. The steps to create an accessible document will vary depending on the original file format you use. Visit Creating Accessible Documents and Forms (IT Accessibility Knowledge Base) to learn what considerations you should keep in mind.

If you have an inaccessible PDF that must be shared, use the repair tools in Adobe Acrobat to remediate it. Visit Remediating Inaccessible Documents and Forms (IT Accessibility Knowledge Base) to learn more about repairing PDFs.

Finally, when you share a link to a PDF, be sure to indicate that the link goes to a PDF file. For example, you might title the link “January 2021 Meeting Notes (PDF)”.
 

Resources

• PDF Accessibility (WebAIM)
• Avoid PDF for On-Screen Reading (Nielsen Norman Group)
• PDF: Still Unfit for Human Consumption, 20 Years Later (Nielsen Norman Group)