PDFs: Handle with care
- Article 16 of 26
- M-iD, March 2005
There is more to Adobe Acrobat PDFs than meets the eye, especially if an organisation wants its documents to be accessible for disabled users.
Page 1 | Page 2 | All 2 Pages
To create a fully accessible PDF with summary data for tables so that screen readers can provide brief synopses of tables rather than reading them all out, can take a day for someone with a good understanding of XML, suggests Randall. This puts it out of reach of many organisations, he concedes.
But, he adds, “a few little things can make it a bit better. Just be reasonable in what you do.”
Mekon's recommendations for PDF accessibility
- Document colours: high-contrast colours should be chosen for background and text to enhance readability;
- Bookmark text size: this feature, which allows the size and wrapping of bookmarks to be controlled, should be set to large to increase readability;
- Automatic scrolling: setting slow automatic text scrolling means readers will not need to use a mouse to scroll through the document;
- Read out loud: activating this feature will allow a section, page or entire document to be read out loud by a screen reader;
- Reflow: this feature provides readers with a magnified version of the document which they can read without needing to use a mouse;
- Multimedia: switching on features such as subtitles will help to increase accessibility;
- Create articles: creating articles will allow screen readers to link paragraphs of text which carry over on to different pages so that the user has access to the full article.
Page 1 | Page 2 | All 2 Pages