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

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 is half geek, half designer, and 100% teacher. She has several decades of experience in publishing and academia, as well as being an InDesign ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) and accessibility specialist. Her firm, PubCom.com, works with government, commercial, and STEM publishers to improve their overall publishing workflow for cross-media publishing and to build accessible features into all their publications and media. She is the senior trainer for her firm which teaches publishing technologies and accessibility, and is the author of the firm’s acclaimed series of step-by-step books for creating accessible publications and digital media. During her career, Chagnon has been an award-winning commercial magazine art director; adjunct faculty member at several colleges for graphic design, digital media, and computer technologies; managing editor; director of publications and outreach; and software beta tester/advisor to many technology companies.