Making accessible pdfs in Adobe InDesign: a starter guide for designers
This guide is for getting started in making PDFs from InDesign more accessible. It is meant as a starter: there are many other places that go into much further detail - I will link to some of these at the bottom of the post.
In general, there are six things you can do in InDesign which will put your pdf in a very good place to be more accessible. Making a habit of these and integrating them into your workflow will get you ahead and you won’t have to do much post-export editing in Acrobat Pro. Doing all these corrections in Acrobat Pro is doable, BUT very time consuming and a frustrating process.
Document titles and metadata
Styles and tags
Alt text
Colour contrast
Bookmarks
Articles
Who is this guide for?
You might use InDesign daily to make PDFs for projects, you might have dipped your toe into accessibility but haven’t done it regularly or you might have had to rush it at the end of a job and aren’t any wiser. This will get you rolling: you can introduce this into your workflow and build on it from there.
It’s important to note that everyone who works in accessibility will tell you there’s no such thing as 100% accessible, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably fibbing. You can make things as accessible as you possibly can given your time, money and resources constraints. The important thing is that you do it, learn from it and feed that into the next pdf that you make. Accessibility in InDesign is a constantly improving process.
If it still seems like a lot, you can always hire me to do it for you. Drop me an email at ed@edclews.com and let's chat through what you need.
Why am I making a pdf accessible in InDesign?
There could be all sorts of reasons you’re doing it for work:
You’re working on something for a client who needs it but doesn’t have the capacity or expertise in-house
It’s for a document that legally requires it (for instance you might work for a council or other public-facing body that needs the pdf to be as readable as possible)
It needs doing and your role is the nearest that connects to it (this is possibly the most likely)
The primary thing to remember is that you’re making it easier for the person at the end to read your PDF, no matter what circumstances they’re in. It’s not just boshing something out to tick a box, this needs to be an ongoing part of your workflow.
The image below from Microsoft’s Inclusive Design 101 Guide shows different examples of circumstances that people can be in that can affect how they interact with something. Your design work is a small part of a larger effort that will help them reduce the amount of friction or obstacles that they need to access the information they need - in this case read the document you’re working on.
A more detailed example is Anne Gibson’s Alphabet of Accessibility which gives an idea of the broad spectrum of people that accessibility can help.
What standards am I working to?
This depends on who you’re working for and what it’s needed for. You might have heard of WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) AA, AAA and maybe even UA. These are primarily web standards but they still cross over into pdfs as they use HTML tags in their structure to make them accessible.
Depending on your organisation and the end user looking at the pdf, you might be working towards AA, AAA or have set some standards internally. Remember that accessibility is an ongoing process, you won’t get everything in one go so set yourselves an initial target, assess it when you’re done and decide on the next steps and make sure everyone else in your design team also is working towards these.
For example:
I am making a 20 page online A5 magazine for a client that will sit on their website. They don’t have any standards that they work to, but want to be accessible to more customers and this is part of that process.
I will add document titles, set all my styles in InDesign, have alt text on images, check colour contrasts, bookmarks and articles as a good starting standard.
The next issue will come out in six months. In the time between when each magazine comes out, the client researches with their customers on how they are reading the magazine and finds a couple of touch points that they want to address. In this case they’d like to add more detailed captions to pictures and diagrams. They’d also like to simplify some of the language in the copy so it’s less jargon heavy or add some more explainer boxes for some of the more technical aspects they’re talking about.
This feedback goes into the design of the next magazine and what has been learnt is spread throughout the team. This will be the standard that they’ll work to for this next issue and anything else they might work on, and then revisit it regularly throughout the year.
Accessibility workflow
Putting the effort in up-front versus doing it at the end or afterwards (remediation)
In an ideal world, we would be considering accessibility at every point in a project from start to finish. Unfortunately most designers don’t have the luxury of doing this for various reasons. You might be working on more than one project, you might be one of several people working on something or you may have come in at a particular stage later in the project's life.
I think a good approach is getting as much prep done upfront leaving you less you’ll have to deal with at the end (or someone else has to pick up later).
The below diagram is an example project from start to finish. You might be working on a project that has less or more stages or a different setup but the sentiment is still the same. Think of it as rehearsal: more preparation at the start is less hassle in the sprint at the end of the project.
Graph showing an example project with the relative effort needed to make a document accessible up-front versus towards the end of the project.
What InDesign can’t do
Accessibility-wise, you can achieve a lot in InDesign. You can do a hefty chunk of work but there’s a few final bits that need to be done in Acrobat Pro, especially once you start validating pdf’s in PAC. Things like defining parts of tables and setting PDF/UA compliance - there’s lots of finicky bits you’ll find later that you didn’t even know were there. I won’t be covering that here: look at the Further Links section down the bottom of the page if you want to explore this further.
Tip: Try not to end up in a place where you say “No problem, we can fix that later in Acrobat”. Acrobat Pro is a right pain in the arse to edit pdfs with, really fidgety and you can’t really undo things properly. Try and get as much set up as possible in InDesign and make sure you have a cut off point for amends or revisions so then you can export and start polishing the pdf off in Acrobat.
1: Document titles and metadata
Screenshot of the InDesign File Info section where you can add your Document Title and Author details in. This is also a common feature in Illustrator and Photoshop.
First up is an easy one. Adding a descriptive document title will give a more helpful context to your pdf. You can also add a further detailed description should you need to - this might be handy to include a short blurb covering the contents.
In InDesign go to File > File Info. In the Basic section add your Document Title in at the top. Stick an author name in, even if it’s just you for the moment as it will be handy to track who has been working on the doc if it gets handed over to someone else six months later and they have questions. Don’t forget to check these at the end before you publish the doc.
The rest of the options in that panel lets you add metadata that can be used by different formats. Metadata is data that is about other data – it lets you describe what data is, how it works, what to do with it. This is a common panel in many Adobe programs like Photoshop and Illustrator as well as more general programs - even Powerpoint and Word have some form of this panel. Feel free to stick a copyright notice in if you want but you can leave the rest.
2. Styles and tags
Using styles in your InDesign doc will save you a ton of time and heavy lifting later on in the process, especially if you’re coming up on a deadline.
If you're creating and using styles from the start, you can easily change the size, colour or other formatting of text with a few clicks rather than having to go through the whole document and slowly do it individually. Building this habit of doing it from the start will save yourself so much time and hassle later on from having to retag bits.
For this example we’ll make a body paragraph. To create a new paragraph style, make sure your Paragraph Styles panel is open (go to Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles / go to Type > Paragraph styles / press F11).
Click the little menu in the top right and click New Paragraph Style - this will open the options box. Alternatively clicking the cross in the square icon at the bottom right of the panel will do the same but create a new style without opening the options box.
In the General tab, give your style a name.
In the Basic Character Formats tab, set your style to whatever you need.
In the Export Tagging tab, on the PDF dropdown at the bottom set your pdf tag to P for paragraph. If you wanted a header, you’d pick one of the H’s.
Click OK.
Then if you type out some text and select it, you can click that option in the Paragraph Styles panel and it will apply it.
NOTE: see that little icon at the top right in the Paragraph Styles panel that says [a+]? This is like a highlighter pen to show what bits of text don’t have a style applied to them. It’s really handy for reviewing your design later on to make sure that you’ve gotten things set up.
A good basic starter structure
Break it down into sections if you need to. You can use the folders in the paragraph styles panel to group parts together for different areas.
For the cover page
Cover title (h1)
Cover subheader (h2)
Cover body (p)
Commonly used throughout the document
Page title (h1)
Page subtitle (h2)
Page body (p)
Image caption (p)
On this page, I’ve made styles for a header, sub-header and three types of paragraph styles (the main body copy, the name and the job title of the person featured).
Example of already defined paragraph styles set up on a page.
Remember to keep it as simple as possible with styles. Even if you have a chunky document that has lots of different sections you can still whittle styles down to a more manageable amount. It just takes a bit of planning ahead.
Things to remember to check:
Hyphenation
Language
Space before / after for spacing around your paragraph
Character styles or paragraph styles?
One thing that can be initially confusing is the difference between Character Styles and Paragraph Styles. Some people end up marking paragraphs with character styles, and vice versa.
I find the best way to remember it is Character Styles are for individual letters and numbers, Paragraph Styles apply to the whole paragraph. I use character styles for:
Having numbers in superscript for footnotes
Making letters bold for start of lists highlighting particular words
Hyperlinks (this is done automatically when you create a link but you get the idea)
Note: there are also Table Styles and Object Styles. I won’t go into them here but they work similarly. If you’re feeling a bit more confident using Paragraph Styles, have a go at the Table Styles. They’re worth learning but can be a bit finicky in parts.
3. Alt text for images
An example of alt text hover over in Acrobat from my portfolio pdf.
Alt text in pdf documents works the same as in web browsers, it lets you hover your mouse over and see a description of the image. It also assists people using screen readers like NVDA or JAWS in describing an image in a document, and adds more context and structure to the doc.
Adding alt text in InDesign
To add alt text to an image in InDesign, right click your image and go to Object Export Options (this is also under Object > Object Export Options in the File menu).
Go to the Alt Text tab then under Alt Text Source pick Custom from the drop down. Add in your alt text and click Done. How complicated your alt text will be depends on what the image is and what its context is with the rest of the page. There are three examples further down the page.
InDesign example showing alt text being added to an image.
TIP: write all your descriptions into a shareable spreadsheet so you can save them for later or revisit them. It can also be handy to have a second person like a writer or someone familiar with the text to review and edit them.
Note: there are programs like Powerpoint that use AI to guess alt text but they’re not especially great at it and at best the descriptions are very broad and generic, at worst they describe something completely different. Do yourself a favour by spending about 15 minutes per image to get a decent description. The more you do it out of habit, the easier it will become.
The BBC has a big guide here on how to write alt text descriptions. I also recommend looking at the most recent RNIB campaign on alt text that they’ve been running this year.
Artefact or alt text
It also helps to decide what image does and doesn’t need alt text. If the image is just a part of the design or doesn’t really help the text in the document, then you can use the Artefact tag.
In the page layout below, I have a wiggly wavy line that is a decorative element that adds something extra to the page design. It doesn’t have anything to add to the story of the page, it just looks nice. Making it an Artefact lets screen readers ignore it.
To make an image an artefact, right click on the object then go to Object Export Options. Click on the Tagged PDF tag then make sure that Apply Tag is set to Artefact.
Example of an image being tagged as an artefact in InDesign. In this case it’s the wobbly lines that decorate the bottom right of the page and are just there to look nice.
Three examples of alt text for images
Alt text can range from simple to complicated depending on what is being described and what the context is. Here’s three examples that I’ve broken down into levels.
A simple image where it’s just introducing a person or thing.
A slightly more complicated description where someone or something is doing a thing, and there are surrounding elements that can link to the image and support the description.
An image that needs explaining more in the alt text and in any supporting text around it.
I found this way to be helpful in breaking down what sort of image needs what sort of alt text description. You can vary this yourself depending on how you work and what you design for.
Example one: simple alt text
Simple alt text example page mock up for Fancy Company (I got the profile pic from Unsplash)
Here’s a simple report page mock up I’ve made up for a fictional company called Fancy Company. Wendy Letterscope has her profile picture on this page, as she wrote the text for it. I’ve got a simple bit of alt text on it as that’s all it needs: ‘Profile shot of Wendy Letterscope. She wears a casual pink top with beads and is at a standing desk with a laptop on it.’ It puts her in context to the reader so they have an idea of who she is.
Example two: slightly more complicated
This page shows the image with more context.
Here’s a second slightly more complicated page which is a mock up for a piece in a horse racing magazine. The alt text says ‘Apprentice jockey Jonny Peate riding Azano to the starting gates at York Races.’ This is further supported in context by having text in the blue boxout that also connects to the image and a caption below which supports the image by giving it a bit more detail.
Example three: complicated image or diagram
Report page example. The alt text is quite detailed and is further supported in context by text in the body copy, header and caption below.
Here I’ve made up a page in a report for a global retail company that is summarising its UK divisions efforts and how it compares to other nearby sectors,
There is a simple bar graph showing results which I’ve summarised in the alt text as ‘A bar graph showing our market share of the UK retail sector versus four of the nearest European sectors. The UK is 37%: France is highest at 56%, Spain is 44%, Germany is 40% and the Netherlands is 33%. These are all still higher than the global average of 30%.’
I’ve also got a header above that summarises the graph and a caption below that also adds a bit of narrative to the graph’s story. In the left hand text I would also have commentary around the scores and what it means for the company's long term outlook. Between the four elements of the left hand text, header, graph and caption on the page, they’re all supporting each other but the alt text on the graph can also be read on its own.
Note: in the report page example above I have placed the graph as a jpeg so that the alt text will appear as a hover over. If you place your graph as an Illustrator Ai file this hover over doesn’t show as the pdf reads in the text and shapes in the Ai file as separate elements. The alt text will still be there (you can check in Acrobat Pro under the Order or Tags panel) but the pdf has decided that it will include the extra detail (see Graph Export Example below). Bear this in mind for your end user (especially if you have pages full of diagrams or graphs).
Graph export example: on the left the jpg shows as one element in the exported pdf, and on the right the Illustrator Ai file shows as many elements.
An example of who does alt text well is Money Saving Expert. The descriptions on their graphs are very concise. Have a look at other sites and see how they do theirs.
The alt text for the one below is: “A graph showing how much you would need to save in top easy access accounts and top two-year fixes to bust your personal savings allowance. In 2020, you'd have needed £250,000 as a basic-rate taxpayer and £125,000 as a higher-rate. Now, those with £20,000 can easily bust their allowance and start paying tax on a portion of their interest.”
Money Saving Expert example to show how they write their alt text.
4. Colour contrast
Checking colour contrast is important as it helps those with the various types of colour blindness or other reasons that might restrict their eyesight.
If you run the standard Accessibility check in Acrobat Pro, colour contrast turns up as a manual check, meaning you’ll have to do it yourself. If you’re working to WCAG AA or AAA standards, the text will have to have enough contrast between it and the background to have a decent contrast ratio. Fortunately there’s many contrast checkers available (some listed below).
Example from the accessibleweb.com site with a passing colour ratio
Where it will get a bit more complicated is if you’re making a document that has to work for both web and print. Ideally you’d have separate versions for RGB (web) and CMYK (print) output but you might not have the time or resources to do this. It also depends on how and where you’re getting it printed. If you’re doing a project that’s web first, stick with RGB then either convert the colours on export to CMYK or have your printer do the conversion as they’ll have a better idea on the print output. However, if you’ve got lots of vibrant colours or want to put spot colours in there, make a separate version specifically for print and relink converted images and
In general, don’t do combos of similar colours or eye watering combinations for important text. Also if you’ve got text overlaid on a busy picture this will probably not help a lot of people either. Find a work around by boxing out the text or moving it elsewhere on the page if possible.
Here are some colour contrast checkers that tell you if it passes WCAG guidance.
Web Accessibility Color Contrast Checker - Meet WCAG Conformance
Leserlich Contrast calculator - This one looks at both web and print colours. Handy if you need to compare or readjust your colouring to bring both the print and web versions more into line.
5. Bookmarks
Bookmarks are dead easy to add and they give your pdf more structure for screen readers to look at. Depending on how your document is structured, you might use bookmarks to mark a section of eight pages or you may want to add more into that section to highlight specific parts. It’s mostly down to your judgement.
If you don’t have the bookmarks panel visible, it’s under Window > Interactive > Bookmarks. To make one, click on your page that you want to bookmark then click the little plus button at the bottom of the panel. Give your bookmark a title and that is it.
If you hover over the bookmark in the Bookmarks panel list it should show which page it goes to. Sometimes this can be a bit temperamental so give the page thumbnail in the Page panel a few firm double clicks to make sure before you do. You can always delete the bookmark and redo it.
If you’re feeling really fancy you can make sub bookmarks in the Bookmark panel by dragging one into another. This might be overkill for what you’re working on - I try to just keep it simple and not have these if possible.
Bookmarking example in InDesign
In the example above I’ve got a rough 11 page document. There’s a cover and back page, an introduction, a UK retail update then two made up articles about horse racing and cakes. These are the example mock up pages I made for this post.
The Cover, Intro, UK Retail report and back page all have their own individual bookmarks, the two articles just have one bookmark each. I would not make bookmarks for each article page unless the articles were particularly lengthy (like 12 pages) or there was one part I really wanted to highlight in particular.
6. Articles
The articles panel will also help you add structure to your pdf by dragging the elements of the page into the panel. Imagine it stringing the pieces of the page together in an order. All the work you’ve put in making Paragraph Styles and Alt Text in gets pulled into this to build a solid structure in a pdf that can be read by screen readers. The Articles panel compiles it all together.
Example of articles laid out in the InDesign Articles panel. These are individual elements on the page without using Text Threads. Note the ticked ‘Use for tagging order in Tagged PDF’ option.
Making an article is as simple as dragging a page element into the Articles panel (if you don’t have it open, it’s under Window > Articles). Do this in the order that you want them to be read on the page.
Here’s a quick example of a page reading order and that reflected in the Articles panel.
TIP: make sure you turn on ‘Use for tagging order in Tagged PDF’ in the Articles panel. This tells InDesign to follow this structure on Export. Bafflingly it’s not on by default.
Simple example of text threads being used in InDesign.
Text Threads in InDesign
If you’re using Text Threads the Articles panel lets you drag in one of your story frames rather than having to do them individually for each page. There’s reasons why to use and not to use Text Threads which I won’t get into here. They’re very handy in most situations but can take a little while to get used to. Watch this video with the world’s sleepiest sounding tutor to understand Text Threads more.
Should you use Text Threads? It depends. Text Threads are very handy in that you can keep everything together in one lump and reduce the amount of elements and potentially things that can go wrong in an export. But I don’t think they lend themselves to very complicated layouts.
If you’re doing a pdf with lots of text in it, like a book or document with minimal extra bits in it like images or sidebars / pull outs, go mad on Text Threads. I would even look at Primary Text Frames as that will help you flow the text into your document in one go. You can get even fancier and start looking at something like Wordsflow to link Word or Excel docs into your InDesign doc.
For something like a magazine with a complicated layout and all sorts of elements on the page it becomes a bit of an effort trying to manage all of those (luckily you can still drag them into the Articles panel). I tend to use Text Threads only for the main copy on those pages and not run it over multiple pages.
Last year I worked on a chonky 250+ page document that was full of text, diagrams and graphs. I used Text Threads to manage the pages with large blocks of text on them. Some of the diagrams I had to keep as inline images in the story as they were in the context of the text, others I could keep separate. This also meant that I didn’t have large inline images knocking themselves or text over onto following pages, which kept my page count (and stress levels) down. It’s all a bit of a balancing act and will differ for each project.
A spread of pages in InDesign showing examples of Text Threading.
Above is a very simple example of an article using text threads shown over multiple pages. Note I haven’t put the images inline into the story. In this instance the article is concentrating on the text and the images are secondary but for something like the report example in the Alt Text section I would string them together.
This is very annoying.
Also note that using text threads brings its own little quirks like having to add in Frame Breaks otherwise the paragraph style from the previous frame can carry over.
7. Exporting your pdf
Export dropdown in InDesign showing the Interactive pdf option selected
There’s two ways to export a pdf in InDesign: as an interactive pdf or as a print pdf. You can use either one but there are differences on export and what is exported. For now, just go for an interactive pdf BUT further down the road you might want to do it as a print version as that gives you more control options over image sizing and version control which impacts file sizing.
But before that, go through the checklist below and have a quick tidy up.
Pre-export checklist
Check your Document Title and Author in the File Info panel: has the title changed since you started or are there different or additional authors?
Have you potentially missed any Paragraph Styles? Use the [a+] box in the top of the Paragraph Styles panel to check.
Have all your images got alt text? Have you got them written down in an excel file for you to refer to later.
Do all the Paragraph Styles have the relevant language set in them?
Have you set the PDF tag in the Export Tagging tab in all your Paragraph Styles?
Have you checked your colour contrast?
Have you checked if all the bookmarks match the same pages?
Are all your elements into the Articles panel?
Did you turn on ‘Use for Tagging Order in tagged PDF’ in the Articles panel?
Have you had a proper break with a sit down and a cup of tea not in front of your computer?
Now you’ve done that, you can go to File > Export then pick Adobe PDF (Interactive) from the dropdown.
By default the Create Tagged PDF and Use Structure For Tab Order boxes should be ticked - if not make sure they’re on.
Under the Advanced tab, make sure Display Title is set to Document Title and Language should be set to whatever is set up in the main document (in this case English: UK)
Click Export, let it do its business and that should be all done and you can move on for testing and review.
If you want to do it via the Print PDF options, you’ll need to check a few extra boxes.
In the General tab make sure that the Create Tagged PDF, Bookmarks and Hyperlinks checkboxes are ticked.
In the Pages section you might want to check if you want to export in pages or spreads - is your document set up with double page spreads?
Under the Advanced tab, make sure that under the Accessibility Options that Display Title is set to Document Title.
You can then click Export.
8. Testing
Testing your pdf should be a key part of making your document before you release it into the wild to frolic around (or sit on a web page somewhere). Unfortunately this is one of the parts that falls to the wayside either through time, money or incentive. It’s probably one of the least understood areas of accessibility but most needed, but can be a hard sell to others further up the chain in a company or to a client.
An ideal document workflow might look like:
Design and test elements with end users who use assistive technology like NVDA.
Do all the above work setting up your document, then test with users again.
Test your export in the Acrobat Accessibility checker, in PAC and something like NVDA. Amends from those checks.
Test with end users again and amending accordingly.
Release the pdf and get feedback to revise the document in next steps.
Not many designers, even in large organisations, have access to user testing groups nor the budget or time. Most likely you’ll only be able to do the testing in Acrobat Pro and maybe PAC. This is a strategic long term issue that needs to be sold into organisations and a conversation for another day. What you could do is look at Accessibility Statements, which are often used by organisations as an alternative to making their websites accessible e.g. we can’t do this level of accessibility now but here’s our roadmap for doing it.
For now, let’s look at testing the document in Acrobat Pro.We’ve done all our set up in the previous steps so hopefully there won’t be much to alter.
In Acrobat Pro the Accessibility panel can be quite hidden thanks to questionable design decisions by Adobe (this might also vary by app version - I’m using the latest one from Creative Cloud as of July 24).
There’s two flip out panels on either side of Acrobat’s window. The left one is the Navigation pane, the right one is the Tools Pane. You can flip these out using the tiny arrows halfway down the screen or pressing F4 or Shift F4 for each pane (see below screenshot).
The Accessibility panel is a little man in a purple circle - click that to open up the panel. If it’s not there, you can add the shortcut by clicking the More Tools icon on the bottom right of the Tools Pane, scroll down to Protect & Standarize and add the Accessibility shortcut.
Where to find the Navigation and Tools panes in InDesign
The Tools pane shortcut screen showing where to find the Accessibility button shortcut.
To run an accessibility check in Acrobat Pro, click the Accessibility icon then Accessibility Check then click Start Checking and let it do its business.
Note: In the panel there are 31 out of 32 options already ticked by default, you can turn these on and off once you get to know them plus also run off an accessibility report you can send to people if you’re just doing the checking. The one option that isn’t ticked is Tables Must Have A Summary (no real idea why that’s off by default) which you can fix in Acrobat Pro later.
In the example below, I’ve run the checker on a pdf I exported using the default High Quality Print pdf option in InDesign without checking any extra options so you can see what will come up. All the things that need checking will come up in the Accessibility Checker results on the left hand side highlighted in bold.
In this example:
The Title failed - this is where you set it to Document Title under the Advanced > Accessibility options. You can right click Title - Failed and click Fix and that will sort that one.
Tab order failed - in the interactive pdf export this is already sorted, in the print one you need to check Create Tagged PDF then in the Accessibility Checker right click on ‘Tab order - Failed’ the click Fix. A box will pop up saying ‘Tab order set to match structure order in all pages successfully’ which will sort that.
Logical Reading Order and Colour Contrast always need a manual check so have a read through of those and you can right click then pass those off.
None of the bookmarks will show up in a Print pdf export but will off the interactive pdf. The Bookmark panel icon is the second one down on the left hand panel in the image below.
Other things that will probably come up:
You’ll probably miss some alt text so go back and fix those descriptions.
Tables: I won’t cover them here as they’re an article in themselves. Have a read of this example here which will give you an idea of the work involved.
Interactive form fields: also a separate article. Give this a read as a starter.
Now let's go back and export my pdf as an interactive pdf, run the Accessibility Checker and see what’s what. Looking at the results the only two issues highlighted are the Logical Reading Order and the Colour Contrast which I’ll check manually so I can assume I’ve done a decent job of it.
If I look at the bookmarks tab, the Bookmarks are showing and in the Accessibility tags tab I can see that articles are structured (see screenshots below).
Example showing Bookmarks in the Acrobat Pro bookmarks panel.
Example showing Article tags in the Accessibility tags panel in Acrobat Pro.
At this point I think the pdf is at a good place and ready to publish online. Depending on what standard you’re working to, you could do a few things at this point.
Have a go through the document with the NVDA screen reader. It would be a good idea to familiarise yourself with this anyway, this guide by Adam Liptrot will get you started.
If you have the resources, have other people (preferably with assistive technology like a screen reader) read the document and see if they pick up anything you might have missed).
After all that effort, run your pdf through PAC and see how many things it wants you to sort out.
You too will make this face (to be honest, it’s not that much and easily sortable in Acrobat Pro).
Summary
There’s plenty to get your head around there and you definitely won’t get everything right the first time around. I’ve not covered a lot of things but there are plenty of resources to look at which look at the real deep dive problems that you have to drill down into (see the links below for starters). Things like making manual amends in Acrobat Pro in the Accessibility or Print Production Preflight tab would be the next things I’d recommend looking up but for now crack on with the above steps and that will get you going well.
I’m intending to update this every so often with tweaks or links. If you have any questions you can also email me at ed@edclews.com.
Further links
Other document types
Document series by Nicki Berry - as of July 24, Nicki Berry is running a document series on her blog looking at accessibility on Word, Excel, Powerpoint and other doc types.
Facebook groups
PDF Accessibility - an excellent resource and full of friendly people willing to help others (as they’ll have been in the same position as you. The admins (Dax Castro, Chad Chelius, Anne-Marie Concepción amongst others) also have lots of courses on Youtube and LinkedIn Learning which I recommend diving into.
Guides to Screen readers
A guide to using NVDA - a good starter guide on using NVDA
How to document the screen reader user experience - Further reading on UX design approach for screen readers
Setting up a screen reader testing environment on your computer - Step by step guide to a screen reader test environment by Sara Soueidan.
Colour contrast
Colour contrast checker free program - Contrast checker program. One of many you can get - I’ve no real preference for this one.
Leserlich Contrast calculator - this one lets you look at both RGB and CMYK, handy to compare both.
Alt text
BBC guide on how to write alt text descriptions - concise guide for writing alt text at the Beebs.
RNIB alt text campaign for 2024 - RNIB have been running some very good campaigns this year including this one on alt text.
Accessible formats
Accessible communication formats - GOV.UK - Government guidance for a wide range of accessible formats.
Creative and Cultural Freelancers study - This study has examples of different accessible formats for a recent report by the Arts Council. It includes the original report pdf, large print, easy read, British sign language (BSL) and audio options.
Accessible numbers
Accessible numbers: presenting numbers and data clearly - research by Laura Parker on making numbers easy to read with an emphasis on those with dyscalculia and low numeracy. She also has a few decks here on accessible content design and writing.
WCAG
WCAG, but in language I can understand - easy guide to help get your head around WCAG guidelines. There are also posts on WCAG AAA and WCAG 2.2.
PAC PDF Accessibility checker
PAC PDF accessibility Checker - for testing your pdf’s in depth. Note that there is also a 24 version which has an extra Quality panel. From speaking to others working in accessibility I think most people prefer the 2021 version that’s linked as the results are better. I have both of them just to see if they come up with different results.
Taggedpdf.com - If you find PAC infuriating (like everyone else) then searching through this site will give you a load of solutions to the errors that PAC brings up.
The Accessibility Guy - an accessibility Youtuber! Loads of videos on fixing pdf problems in PAC.
Path Object Not Tagged - fairly common error in PAC, see this to fix it.
ACCESSIBLE PDFs: How to Add a PDF/UA Identifier - another easy tweak in Acrobat to fix.
Accessibility Audits and VPATs
A11y you need to know about accessibility audits and VPATs - lengthy read about auditing and having an accessibility statement. This is for a long term strategic planning around accessibility.
Mastering Accessibility Statements, ACRS, VPATs, Documentation & Metadata - Hassell do very good and regular webinars on accessibility and inclusion. This is a good watch for thinking around your long term approach on accessibility statements.
Language and content design
Designing for people with limited English - Home Office guide and design principles
Misc links
Accessibility for designer: where do I start? by Stéphanie Walter - UX Researcher & Designer. - massive resource by Stephanie Walter on accessibility which she regularly updates
Guidance on producing clear and large print documents - looking at large print formats
Adobe InDesign Best Practices: Creating Accessible EPUB Files – AccessiblePublishing.ca - This is aimed at epub documents but there’s some crossover with pdf exports.
