Embracing Accessible PDF Documents: Key Learnings from the Accessibility Seminar in Toronto

Guest blogger contribution from Doug Koppenhofer.

We were joined by approximately 15 people in the Ontario Accessibility community earlier this autumn at an exclusive seminar we hosted at the Renaissance Hotel in Downtown Toronto.

The presenters were Thomas Logan, Senior Accessibility Consultant from SSB Bart Group, Shannon Kelly – Accessibility SME from Actuate, Lou Fioritto, CEO of Braille Works International, as well as Jeff Williams, Director of Product Management, and Will Davis, Manager NA Presales, of Actuate.

The presentations provided in-depth insight into the document accessibility problems facing organizations in Ontario in particular. We got some great content, which is, of course, tagged for accessibility. All presentations from the Seminar are available here.

A few ideas really crystallized for us in this session. Shannon Kelly’s presentation – co-presented with Lou Fioritto, who is himself blind since birth – delivered a real-life experience using AT or Assistive Technology. Lou was able to give us a side-by-side narrative of using both incorrectly and correctly tagged PDF files. It was a real ear-opener!   People with impairments use a screen reader such as JAWS to deftly navigate websites and PDF files and Lou showed how utterly frustrating it can be to attempt to work through a PDF bank statement with no headers, vaguely tagged graphics and tables with column headers but no row headers. Lou even commented that as a user, if you had to endure this, you’d just give up and get your information from another source!

This begs the question about the perception of PDF files within the visually/cognitively impaired community. Correctly tagged PDF files can now be created at their source and remediated with automation at high speed (see Figure 1 below). However, do decades of bad PDF with errant or no tags spoil it for today’s better PDFs? We suspect this will be debated in the coming months, but we are struck that HVTO (High Volume Transaction Output) content and the visually impaired community are just now beginning to intersect, some would say collide, at high speed. What’s compelling about PDF in HVTO is that it is a correct snapshot of a transaction oriented document with all the elements that accompanied that snapshot when it was created (i.e. logos, offers, signatures). PDF has become a de facto checkbox for those needing to comply with regulations that mandate multi-year retention of exact replica artifacts that can be produced in court. Ever hear of an insurance company coming to court with HTML representations of an insured’s date-stamped renewal notice? Nope, it’s all about PDF when the lawyers are involved. So, the thinking goes: “PDFs are not going away, so why not work with PDFs rather than other, less-structured, less-accepted formats?”

Figure 1. Tagged PDF Documents can be properly read by JAWS Screen Reader.

Another idea that kind of blew us away was the immediacy of impending legal mandates, and for this we have to thank SSB Bart and some attendees from a top Canadian Financial Institution. First, in the US, both Title III of the ADA AND Section 508 are expected to be updated. Title III may be explicitly calling out websites as places of accommodation. Section 508 will likely point to and embrace WCAG 2.0. Both of these changes are expected by Spring 2014. In Ontario, the AODA states that if you host content on your website, the content must be accessible by January 2014, four short weeks from now.

We’d like to thank our presenters and attendees. As usual, I think we learned as much at our seminar from the attendees as the other way around. It was an impressive show of community-smarts, and we were glad just to be associated.

It was so successful, Actuate has decided to take the show on the road. The next installment will be held in Charlotte, NC on January 23, 2014 – check out the agenda and let us know if you are interested in taking part!