The PDF Workshop — Checking files for PDF/UA and WCAG Compliance

Presented at 9:00am in Denver 1-3 on Tuesday, November 15, 2022.

#36543

Speaker(s)

  • Bevi Chagnon, Designer, Senior Accessibility Trainer, PubCom.com

Session Details

  • Length of Session: 5-6-hr
  • Format: Lab
  • Expertise Level: Beginner
  • Type of session: Pre-conference

Summary

Learn how to check, review, test, remediate, and validate PDFs for accessibility compliance. Whether you’re reviewing your own PDFs, your organization’s PDFs, or digital deliverables from outside contractors and vendors, this hands-on course gives you the skills and background information to determine whether PDFs are compliant — and how to decide the best strategy to bring them into compliance.

Abstract

There are no one-size-fits-all solutions for accessible PDFs; this course teaches how to maximize your documents' accessibility and evaluate your options for individual PDFs or thousands on your website.

You'll learn key techniques that will help remediate PDFs, including: • Use Acrobat’s accessibility checker and PAC3 checker to check files • Evaluate tag trees for compliance, understand what passes and what needs remediation • Edit tags • Add tags to an existing PDF • Determine what caused the problem in the source document • Decide when it's best to correct shortcomings in the source file (ie, MS Word, etc.) • OCR and add tags to scanned PDFs • Check the different reading orders in PDFs • Complete the metadata and document properties • Preflight and validate a PDF with the PDF/UA-1 medallion

Class is full of helpful tips and strategies to help you make better decisions, including when to outsource remediation to professionals or send the file back to the author for corrections.

Keypoints

  1. Includes step-by-step instructions of various methods and tools.
  2. Reviews software programs for remediating PDFs.
  3. Shows how to preflight, validate, and add the PDF/UA-1 medallion to PDFs.

Disability Areas

All Areas, Cognitive/Learning

Topic Areas

Accessible Course Design, Accessible Educational Materials, Assistive Technology, Teaching about Accessibility in Curriculum, Uncategorized, Universal Design for Learning

Speaker Bio(s)

Bevi Chagnon

Bevi Chagnon has been active in the standards community for 25 years, and currently is a US Delegate to the ISO committees for PDF and PDF/UA. With a long career in publishing, she’s an expert for Adobe InDesign, Acrobat, MS Office, and accessibility. She’s a professional educator, award-winning designer, and former faculty member at Washington DC-area colleges/universities. Bevi is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, and a contributor on many forums, including the Adobe Community Forums where she is an invited Community Expert.