Creating Accessible PDFs

Being ADA Compliant is not only necessary for your school to collect any federal money, it is good educational practice.  By increasing the accessibility of your content, more students will access the content. You already know this, as well as that adopting principles of Universal Design for Learning both increases the accessibility of your content and contributes to the success of students regardless of whether they have a disability.

You would like to share your content with students in PDF format. After all you know that PDFs have advantages in Blackboard, because:

• students can view them inline,
• students can print the files,
• they can choose to save them to their computer or mobile devices,
• the files are not as easy to edit – which can reduce shenanigans or accidentally deleting content, and
• PDFs are and industry standard file. This means most accessibility software can work with PDFs.  

The problem you face is that the school does not supply you with professional software for creating accessible PDFs or software for assessing determining their accessibility.   You have yet to see JAWS – the screen reader or the movie.

In fact, you do not even have access to Adobe Acrobat Professional for making complex, and accessible, PDFs.

Let’s face it – you are an educator in the US and are equipped as such. You pretty much only have access a browser, the LMS – Blackboard, and an older version of Microsoft Office.  You can make accessible Word files with the Accessibility Checker, but how can you make accessible PDFs without access to industry standard software?

Relax - You already have everything you need. 

1.  Simply create a word document that is accessible with the “Accessibility Checker”.

2. Now you simply have to save the document as a PDF. Saving a word document as an accessible PDF is easy. You will need to save the document as a new file, with the PDF file extension.  You can do this by either:

• Selecting “Export” and then choosing “Create PDF”, or
• Selecting “Save as”, or “Save”, and changing the file type to PDF.

3.  Now choose the “Options” button.
In the “Option” pop-up window be sure to select the option, “Document structure tags for accessibility”.

If you use more accessible fonts, such as Verdana, you should be fine.  Otherwise you may consider selecting ISO 19005-1 Compliant PDF/A  option.  It will ensure fonts can be read by a screen reader and not represented as an image (or bitmap). This option is preferable for creating documents that you would like to archive.

4. Now save the file as a PDF.

If you follow these simple rules, you can ensure that your documents are accessible.  You did this with only Microsoft Office.  While you may not get a bonus for the money you saved the school in software, you can sit back and enjoy the reward of knowing that your documents will reach more learners and assist those you greatly benefit from the accessibility.