Accessibility and You
We recently had the pleasure of working with Inter-American Foundation on their 2023 Year in Review. We designed the 12-page report in English, and then updated a translated version with provided Spanish text. One of the important aspects of the project was the importance of accessibility, especially making sure it is 508 compliant, which are a set of requirements for information and communication technology (ICT) to ensure that covered ICT is accessible to, and usable by, individuals with disabilities.
Thankfully, Adobe products such as Acrobat and InDesign come with all the necessary tools to make sure documents are set up to maximize accessibility. Adobe Acrobat comes with a tool that checks a document against the requirements to be 508 compliant and creates a report explaining what aspects of the document have passed or failed.
Below is a checklist to ensure your PDFs are fully accessible. Make sure…
Your file has a publication title.
The document passes the color contrast test. This is only required for important aspects of the document and not decorative elements.
You’re using paragraph styles to clearly indicate hierarchy.
You’re using real bulleted and numbered list, not set with tabs.
Your tables include a header row. For more complicated tables, you may have to make corrections in Acrobat after exporting.
Create a table of contents generated by your software.
That all images include alt text.
Once you’re finished with the document, you simply need to run the accessibility checker in Adobe Acrobat and make corrections if anything has failed, for example deleting random objects that have been tagged or correcting tagging table headers.
