Sometime toward the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was “voluntold” to be part of a universal design committee at my job—a prospect that held a *little* bit of interest for me given my background in psychology and my current position as an editor/writer for our university’s instructional design team, but it wasn’t really my passion. Nonetheless I am happy I was steered into this because I have learned *so much* that is directly applicable to instructional design—namely: the goal to bring all our digital instructional assets into ADA compliance as a general best practice across all university departments.
This isn’t to say that none of our collateral was accessible before; like any college, of course we have a team dedicated to guiding and supporting students with disabilities that includes ensuring that all the course and other learning materials they need for their programs are accessible. But this requires a team to do a lot of on-the-fly PDF remediation and other workarounds, whereas if we simply start creating all our assets in an accessible format going forward, we might not need an entire team dedicated to transcribing videos by hand and testing PDFs with screen readers for every new student who presents a need.
The first issue is that making digital assets accessible when you don’t really know what you’re doing is no small task. It’s a lot like coding in that you have to do a lot of trial-and-error and testing of creative workarounds depending on the level of interactivity within a specific PDF.
The Project
The first PDF I was tasked to “just make it read” included a TON of interactivity. It is a pamphlet about how to identify and prevent student plagiarism, and since we are a school with some unconventional programs, such as recording arts, audio engineering, and filmmaking, there is a plethora of ways in which students might plagiarize, however unintentionally. To help illustrate some of these types of plagiarism, the PDF in question includes links to audio samples relating to audio recording and digital marketing. These were originally created in Flash, which—if you’re an Adobe Creative Cloud user—you are aware by now is no longer supported by Adobe. That means that we needed to do some creative workarounds to get the audio files to play at all within our current PDF without the use of Flash, which was an ordeal in and of itself.
The Process
Luckily, all staff, faculty, and students have an account with LinkedIn Learning, which hosts this incredibly thorough 5-hour crash course on Creating Accessible PDFs with Chad Chelius. While this course covers the bulk of what you need to know to even begin the process, he has another one that goes more in depth when encountering specific scenarios: Advanced Accessible PDFs with Chad Chelius. If you happen to have access to LinkedIn Learning, I highly recommend these courses! There is also a Facebook Group dedicated to this topic.
What I learned immediately is that our team is already at an advantage because we already use defined character and paragraph styles in Word and InDesign [cue Bon Jovi’s chorus line “Whoa, we’re halfway there!”], so an exported PDF with the basic “Create Tagged PDF” and “Use Structure for Tab Order” options checked—as long as it’s flowing text with defined heading levels—should result in an exported PDF that is more or less already accessible.
Of course, this same magic won’t work so seamlessly on something that employs a lot of design elements, tables and figures, and interactivity. While many of the accessibility settings can be set up in InDesign and any source documents, such as Word, Powerpoint, Bridge, or Excel, there will always need to be some additional remediation done in the PDF to ensure it reads as intended and to tweak a few things where InDesign has limitations.
Stay Tuned!
I will be using this blog to post about my learning journey into how to create PDF documents that are accessible to screen readers, sharing useful tips I encounter along the way. This is mostly to help me familiarize myself with the process and aid learning. If you have any additional tips [or corrections!] on the specific topics I’ll be posting about, please leave them in the comments! I’m hoping these posts will help others as much as me.
The Humble Pedant 