Accessible PDFs: Questions, Thoughts and Ideas from a Social Network Exchange

First published on G3ict.org

Should accessible PDF documents be a part of a company’s web accessibility strategy? That’s the question that was posted recently in a LinkedIn web accessibility forum.

The question inspired a lengthy and exciting discussion among accessibility experts from a variety of sectors and roles. What resulted was an informative and multi-faceted conversation that brought up several questions, comments and solutions related to accessible PDFs.

To read the entire LinkedIn exchange, copy and paste this link into your browser:
http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=41800&type=member&item=266438271&trk=groups_search_item_list-0-b-ttl.

For those who just want the quick highlights, I have consolidated a few of the more popular thread themes, questions and ideas that emerged.

PDF Document Accessibility
There was almost full consensus from accessibility experts on the fact that all online PDF documents should be made accessible. Within the LinkedIn discussion, a web accessibility consultant commented that since they’re likely available on a company’s public facing website or customer facing portals, PDFs should be part of a company’s overall web accessibility strategy. “It’s particularly important if that information isn’t available in another format that’s accessible,” a Section 508 accessibility and remediation specialist added. Others pointed out that some companies have gotten around creating accessible PDFs by making the same information available in an accessible HTML format instead.

Keep in mind that whatever the format, when approaching accessibility for what I call the ad-hoc or one-to-many type documents like marketing collateral, publications, informational documents, reports, etc., the approach typically is a manual one whether repairing, touching up or creating accessible PDFs. The key here is to author with accessibility in mind.

What about Archived PDFs?
I also saw a strand of comments regarding whether or not archived PDFs should be available in an accessible format. While many of the contributors in the discussion suggested that ideally they’d like to see historic PDFs made accessible, most saw the process of converting them as too time consuming and cost prohibitive, and in my opinion this is likely, because the traditional approach to making these documents accessible is a manual tagging and repair process that simply couldn’t be applied to such a large volume of archived PDFs.

One researcher in usability and accessibility pointed out that no one would ever look at those documents anyway, while a Section 508 accessibility and remediation specialist stated that converting them would depend on budget, timeliness and importance – otherwise, accessible archived documents could be made available upon request. My opinion here is multi-fold; firstly, whether or not someone would or could look at an archived document shouldn’t be the basis for the decision as to whether it is accessible or not. If the document is made available, it should be made available to everyone, including those with visual disabilities. Traditionally, there hasn’t been a solution that is timely or cost effective that would allow these archived documents to be addressed post-composition, but there is an automated solution on the market now that does just that and produces WCAG 2.0 Level AA compliant PDFs.

“Many companies are mandated – either by internal by-laws or external regulations – to store those historical PDF documents,” wrote my colleague from Actuate. For other companies, allowing customers to access historical documents (including statements or past invoices) may be a value-added service. “Whatever the reason for storing might be, if any time in the future that content needs to be accessed then it goes without saying that it should be accessible,” he added. “That doesn’t mean that organizations have to store the content in an accessible format for the lifespan of the document, but rather can employ a solution to automatically convert documents on-the-fly/on-demand.” This is very exciting since the solution mentioned here is a patented and fully deployed solution performing this very process for very large financial institutions today. It can and is being done!

What about PDF/A format for archived documents?
Many PDFs kept for historical purposes are stored in this format, a Section 508 assistant coordinator pointed out. PDF/A formats have a stricter structure that allows them to remain backward and forward compatible, he added. Could PDF/A formatting get in the way when it comes to accessibility? My colleague responds, “No, it didn’t “negate or hinder … capabilities to provide that content in an accessible format (meaning this format too would work for a solution that applies accessibility tagging or PDF remediation on demand) when the content is requested.” There are exceptions, of course – not every document can be made accessible post production, depending on how it’s been authored or formatted – but a large number can be, without the need to re-author them.

Accessible HTML Instead of PDFs?
A marketing communications consultant pointed out that HTML isn’t always appropriate. For example, it is not appropriate in the case of very long documents or for those that will be distributed mainly through print. A Section 508 assistant coordinator added that if it’s the PDF that’s going to be widely distributed, it should still be available in an accessible format.

I hear this HTML question posed to me frequently, and agree that in many cases HTML or XML is the best format when the content (code) is designed accessibly. HTML and XML typically pose less accessibility issues for assistive technologies like screen readers, particularly for web content. But what about the case of high-volume, electronically-delivered, customer communication documents, like bank statements, telco bills, medical notices, etc.? That is the question I pose and it is a leap for many to consider.

This content is usually presented as PDF and can quickly add up to millions of pages or even hundreds of millions of pages per month, per organization and is therefore in a different category of challenges, mostly due to sheer volume. The typical approach to making PDFs accessible is to design with accessibility in mind, convert to PDF, then check and touch up the PDF– which is the repair or remediation process – and it simply doesn’t fit or scale for statement type PDF documents. They’re also typically not available in HTML or XML, since PDFs are usually the format of choice and are often required for archival and regulatory compliance purposes.

Additionally, large organizations producing these types of communications have often invested heavily in their technology infrastructure with sophisticated software that transforms the data – like names, account numbers, marketing ads, etc. – into print files that get turned into paper communications and also into PDFs for online presentment. So providing accessible HTML/XML in this case may not be a solution. There is now a technology solution that works within the IT enterprises and allows for every PDF to be created completely accessible automatically (to WCAG 2.0 Level AA conformance), so now these companies can include all their e-delivered PDF communications as part of their overall web accessibility strategy.

That’s just a small sample of some of the discussions exchanged on LinkedIn around PDF accessibility as part of an oveall web accessibility strategy – along with a few of my opinions on the topics posed. Thank you to all who provided great insight into the accessibility issues with PDF. I hope we can continue to have more of these types of conversations on social media with lots of industry experts sharing their insights! Please connect with me on LinkedIn or via Twitter.

See more on PDF Accessibility:

» PDF accessibility using PDF/UA format: PDF/UA: What is it? Why is it relevant?

» PDF Association’s PDF/UA Competence Center

PDF Accessibility: What’s in Store?

Post was first published on Media Access Australia’s AccessIQ

There’s been a lot of talk lately, in technology circles, about what’s in store for PDFs. For organisations that are looking for ways to ensure on-demand accessibility for high volumes of PDFs created at the enterprise IT infrastructure level—this is a particularly relevant question.

With that in mind, I wanted to address it here, and offer my own two cents on what I think is going to happen with PDFs—and, specifically, accessible PDFs.

The end of the PDF?

The debate comes down to this: is the PDF being replaced by HTML and XML formats? Many feel that it should be, arguing that HTML and XML simply offer a better user experience, and are easier to make accessible, with a tagged structure inherently compatible to screen reader technology for the blind. From my perspective, though, PDFs aren’t going anywhere—for several different reasons.

First of all, Adobe has invested a lot at the code level for creating better PDFs, including the PDF/UA format, a universally accessible PDF format meant to help PDFs more easily meet accessibility standards and requirements.

And companies, as well, have invested heavily in PDF technology, because most organisations still utilise PDFs—in fact, it’s still the de facto standard for communicating information in a format that’s viewable to most readers.

A trusted technology

Even for those companies who may be using HTML for some uses, there still exists a need for PDFs. Take a bank, for instance. Banks regularly offer their banking information in rich HTML on their online portals, for an informative, user-friendly experience. Most customers wouldn’t think of searching out a PDF in lieu of that experience—at least not for their everyday banking.

Most financial institutions have invested heavily in creating an IT architecture that allows massive amounts of data to be funneled through different types of processes and applications to be converted to both a print file—that goes to the printer and results in the paper statement some still receive via snail mail—and a PDF file, the de facto standard for online presentment.

But banks also have a legal obligation, as do other industries: they must meet regulatory compliance standards that often require the PDF format they output be the official record on file. So even if that bank is offering statement summary information through HTML, they still have an archive of PDF records.

And when individual clients need documentation, for instance, to prove creditworthiness for a mortgage or a loan, HTML won’t cut it—they need the official PDF documentation for those purposes as well.

Accessible answers

From an accessibility standpoint, HTML does have the advantage that covers all scenarios. Tag structure is inherent to HTML, so accessibility can be built in during design. PDFs, on the other hand, often need the tags added, since many are simply output as image-only PDFs.

But technology is  now available  that can  automate the accessibility of these PDFs, making communications created in high volumes at the enterprise IT level, like bank statements, medical notices, bills, etc. completely accessible on-demand, at the same time for all customers—with and without disabilities.

And that’s important. Having full, independent access to information, especially critical financial and health information and documentation, is something no one should have to wait for since technology is available to make it happen. Because even with the growing use of HTML, I don’t think PDFs are going anywhere.

If you have any questions, please leave them in the comment section below or contact me at skelly@actuate.com

4 Challenges of Making Credit Card Statements Accessible

As I discussed in a previous post, Actuate and SSB Bart Group hosted a series of document accessibility webinars in September 2013. The three webinars looked at accessibility from several perspectives, covering accessible documents in the enterprise, including business, legal and industry requirements; core solutions; and high-volume document workflow solutions.

One of the topics we discussed during the webinar series involved the challenges that exist for companies looking to make their high-volume documents barrier-free for the visually impaired.

Take one of the most common high-volume documents as an example: the credit card statement. Document formatting and structure components are much more different in a credit card statement than they are in a low-volume document, but they still need to meet specific needs of the blind and reading-disabled community. To make that statement accessible, financial institutions must first consider 4 separate challenges:

1. Not all visually impaired customers want to self-identify as “disabled.” Studies show that many people simply don’t see themselves as disabled and don’t want to self-label that way: someone who’s dyslexic, for example, or an ageing individual who’s just starting to lose their sight. Having to self-label also conflicts with the universal accessibility movement, which deems that everything should be created in a way that makes it accessible to everyone, whether they have disabilities or not. To meet these needs, financial institutions need to create accessible statements that visually impaired individuals can access without special request.
2. Whether they have special needs or not, customers don’t want to wait for their statements. To receive a credit card statement in an alternate form – including Braille, large print or audio CD formats –customers with vision loss have to request the service from their financial institution. The bank then has it manually converted each month, a process that may take days or sometimes weeks. Customers, as a result, are left waiting to see their charges. This is inconvenient to the customers in question, and makes it more difficult for them to balance their books in a timely manner or dispute a particular charge. To eliminate those time delays and hassles, banks require the technology that would create accessible statements on-demand.
3. By far not all visually impaired customers know Braille. Braille is one of the traditional formats that financial institutions use to provide credit card statements to their visually impaired customers, but it doesn’t meet the needs of all. In fact, Braille literacy is on the decline: according to 2009 findings by the National Federation of the Blind, fewer than 10% of the people who are legally blind in the United States are Braille readers, and only 10% of blind children are learning it. Even if most blind customers knew Braille, not everyone who needs an accessible document is actually blind: 24% of computer users have a dexterity difficulty or impairment, and may need accessible documents to meet their needs as well. Financial organizations should be able to provide statements in a different, more widely accessible format.
4. Creating accessible documents in high volumes is costly. While financial institutions have legal requirements to meet the needs of persons with disabilities, having to manually convert statements on a regular basis is a costly process. Not doing so, though, can lead to litigation and hefty fines. Banks need a tool that meets legal and business requirements, but isn’t as price constrictive.

Organizations with high-volume document output – including financial, telecommunication and insurance organizations – have to print millions of copies of templated documents with individual customer data inserted into them. To make individual statements within those millions accessible but immediately available without the need for customers to self-identify as disabled, those organizations need a tool that automates the process of making online documents accessible and barrier-free through screen reader technology. Screen readers rely on correct tagging of PDF documents, and therefore such tool would be required to produce documents where reading order, images and structural elements are properly marked up (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Defining the reading order of a PDF bank statement.

Because PDF format is widely accepted for online document delivery and archiving purposes, such an accessibility solution for PDF documents would provide an equivalent or comparable experience for the reading and print-disabled community. It would also do this without the prohibitive cost of manually converting documents, and would solve these 4 challenges of creating an accessible bank statement.

5 Steps to Accessible PDF Documents

How do banks and financial institutions make their PDF statements accessible to individuals with disabilities, including blind and visually impaired customers?

In one of my previous posts, I listed four key reasons why organizations should provide accessible electronic documents to their customers. Given the fact that financial institutions have more documents than any other organizations that they must deliver to millions of customers around the world, it would make sense, from business, legal, and customer service points of view to ensure that any documents presented online are accessible and usable to customers with disabilities.

We have all seen bank statements, credit card bills and other financial documents presented to us in PDF format. Unless a customer with a disability requests an alternative format – he or she will receive a standard PDF document. We also know that financial statements have complex structures that include images, graphics, multi-page nested tables, lists, etc., and are not suitable for assistive technology such as screen readers unless they are properly tagged.

So how do banks and financial institutions make their PDF statements accessible to individuals with disabilities, including blind and visually impaired customers? Ultimately, what must be done to ensure that the content of the document is usable, navigable, and accessible?

This process includes five key steps, ensuring that required characteristics that make online PDF statements accessible to screen reader technology are in place:

1. A logical structure and reading order.
This allows screen reader technology to access the information on the page in a logical fashion, equivalent to how a sighted reader views the page. Screen readers inherently read from left to right, top to bottom. This is specifically important given most financial statements contain multiple columns of content. Without identifying the correct reading order the screen reader user would not be able to comprehend the information being announced (see Figure 1 below).

Figure 1: Ensure your PDF document has properly defined logical structure and reading order.

2. Alternate text descriptions for non-text elements. 
Graphics, figures, and images are page elements in a PDF that are traditionally presented only visually. For the visually impaired, these elements must include alternate text describing what is visually displayed, which screen readers can interpret.

3. Navigational aids.
Identification of  headings, links lists, etc. allow screen reader users to utilize navigational commands within their assistive technologies  to go straight to a specific destination within the document or a website, rather than having to manually navigate word by word or letter by letter (see Figure 2 below).

Figure 2: Ensure the PDF document features navigational aids.

4. Security that doesn’t interfere with assistive technology.
The restrictions that are sometimes added to PDF documents – that prevent users from printing, copying, extracting, commenting or editing text – can be a hindrance to screen reader technology and its ability to identify tags and convert on-screen text to speech.

5. Fonts that allow characters to be extracted to text.
Fonts must contain enough information to be extracted as text. If that information isn’t all there, the PDF reader can’t substitute characters correctly, making the output incomplete. That may cause the screen reader to omit words or characters.

Traditionally, financial institutions require individuals to self-identify their disability by requesting an accessible format. Until now, to offer accessible statements, the solution included manually tagging these PDF documents. This manual remediation process is often costly, and always time-consuming, delaying the delivery of the statement to the customer which can hinder their ability to, for example, make timely market decisions. Today, there is a software solution that will automate the process of properly tagging the PDFs – ensuring online documents are readable and usable by users of all abilities.

For more on what it takes to make a PDF document accessible, you read this white paper, PDF Document Accessibility: Regulations, Risks and Solutions for Compliance, authored by The American Foundation for the Blind.

Post first published on G3ict.org.

PDF Accessibility Q&A: What are the Alternatives?

This is another post in my Q&A series. Previous posts covered questions related to the New Solution for Automatic Tagging of High-Volume PDF Documents and Meeting Accessibility Standards.

Traditionally, visually impaired customers have been able to request accessible documents – in Braille, large-print or audio CD formats – from their financial services institutions. However, many in this community are demanding a different approach – one that will allow them to access their documents online and on-demand, just the way their sighted counterparts can. 

The new PDF Accessibility Solution creates tagged PDFs for banks, insurance companies, utilities, and other high-volume print stream environments, making transactional documents accessible through screen reader technology. This solution allows institutions to offer an inclusionary environment that meets the requirements of their visually impaired customers. I often hear questions about how this compares to the other alternatives:

Q: What are the pros and cons of Braille in terms of creating accessible documents for the visually impaired?

While most information can be translated into Braille, and it’s definitely vital to some, not everyone who’s visually impaired can read Braille. In fact, only a small number of blind or partially sighted individuals can, and that number is smaller for the younger generation. Specifically, in 2009 the National Federation of the Blind has reported that fewer than 10 percent of the people who are legally blind in the United States are Braille readers. A mere 10 percent of blind children are learning it. Furthermore, those that can read it need to wait up to 48 hrs to receive their translated statements in the mail, or require special hardware, including a Braille printer, to convert online text into usable information. For those visually impaired consumers who want to be able to interact with information online the same way their sighted counterparts do, a different solution is needed.

Q: What about audio CDs and large-print formatting?

Audio CDs and large print are other common formats that organizations can use to make their documents accessible to their blind and low-vision customers. However, every format has its restrictions. Audio CDs lack the immediacy many consumers (blind or not) want with their transactional information. And large print is only useful for low-vision customers. Institutions also find it difficult to meet high-volume needs with these formats.

Q: What are the benefits of tagged accessible PDFs?

Designed to work with a range of screen reader technologies, accessible PDFs let your visually impaired clients read their transactional documentation online through screen reader technology. But to be able to use that technology effectively, PDFs and documents need to be tagged properly (See Figure 1 – example of tagging for accessibility). That’s why the visually impaired community has become more and more vocal about creating tagged PDFs that are efficient and effective. If it’s done right, tagging allows visually impaired individuals to access documents that are immediate and up to date. Actuate’s PDF Accessibility Solution allows for on-demand access to accessible high-volume content, including bank statements and other transactional information.

Figure 1. PDF Document Tagged for Accessibility

Can you share any feedback you have received regarding tagged PDF documents?

PDF Accessibility Q & A: Who Benefits?

The PDF Accessibility Solution designed for automatic tagging of high-volume customer documents creates accessible PDFs that are readable by assistive screen reader technology. It allows organizations to provide accessible documents to their visually impaired customers on-demand, meet US federal regulations for accessibility and engage in an inclusionary practice.

I have received some questions about the scope of this market. Ultimately – does the visually impaired community need this? Is this a problem when a credit card statement is not available online and on-demand for some and is available for others?

Q: How many customers could a PDF Accessibility Solution potentially help?

Approximately 3.3 million Americans over 40 are blind or have low vision. That number is only growing. In the next decade it’s expected to soar up to 5 million. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom, 4% of the population has vision-related problems. For financial institutions, that means if at least 1% of their customer base has some kind of visual impairment, together they will need a significant number of accessible documents every year. In a bank with 2.5 million customers, for example, at least 25,000 customers would require document accessibility services, for a total of almost 1 million accessible documents annually.

Q: How should banks or other companies approach accessibility? Should visually impaired clients have to identify themselves or prove that they need this service?

For the traditional alternate formats that people have come to expect – Braille, large print and audio – yes, someone would have to identify their need and ask directly, in order to receive personalized statements in custom formats that would meet their needs. For remediated electronic statements that is also true: customers are asked to opt-in.

However, it’s preferred that an individual with disabilities not have to identify him or herself if they don’t wish to. The new PDF Accessibility Solution helps accomplish this, requiring fairly little on the part of the business institution to produce accessible statements that are equally usable by customers with or without disabilities – and are available on-demand and online. That means a customer does not have to identify him or herself or carry the burden of trying to figure out how to ask for an accessible document from the organization or financial institution in question.

Would you agree that print and reading-disabled individuals should have an option to receive accessible documents on-demand?