Authors Andersen, K., Hoss, H., Bridge, C. Published 1st July 2020 Audience Authors, Government/NGOs/Peaks, Industry, Librarians/Researchers/Students ISBN 978-0-7334-3948-3 DOI 10.26288/5f9a2c5999e9e
This report aims to highlight the accessibility of the documents found on four different organisations’ websites. The purpose of this is to highlight the accessibility issues found in PDFs hosted on the internet and what these issues mean for users with disabilities. This report is useful for both document creators and managers who wish to better understand the components of an accessible PDF and how to assess their own document creation processes.
The analysis in this report was conducted using the freely available PDF Accessibility Checker. Throughout the analysis it was clear that many PDFs had fundamental flaws with respect to accessibility, even though visually they looked fine. Some issues can be traced back to the PDF generator used and the document creation process, while others are a result of incorrect document set up. Of the documents assessed 36% were deemed to be wholly inaccessible due to missing internal data in the PDFs. While some organisations’ websites performed better than others, all have significant room for improvement in their provision of accessible PDFs.
1. Introduction 8
1.1. PDF Components 9
2. Methodology 16
2.1. Accessibility Tool 16
2.2. PDF Selection 18
3. Results and Analysis 20
3.1. Interpreting the Graphs 20
3.2. Overall Performance 20
3.3. PDF Tags 22
3.4. Structure Elements 23
3.5. Structure Tree 24
3.6. Role Mapping 25
3.7. Natural language 26
3.8. Fonts and Embedded Files 27
3.9. Content 28
3.10. Alternative Descriptions 29
3.11. Document settings 29
3.12. Metadata 30
3.13. Third-Party Documents 31
4. Assessing a PDF Generator 33
5. Conclusion 35
6. Appendix – PDF Test Document 37
6.1. Example Document 38
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