As you can probably tell from the title, we ultimately decided that a web-based solution would best serve this particular product given the different types of media examples. That doesn’t mean that an accessible PDF isn’t still useful, but they are better served for simple documents composed of running text and, at most, a some tables, bullet lists, and hyperlinks in terms of interactivity and formatting. If you want to embed any type of audio/video media, a web-based solution might be the better option.
My only gripe is that it took me over a month of learning and wracking my brain for a solution before the Occam’s razor solution hit me all at once one day: our in-house LMS was recently overhauled to include a slew of new accessibility features in its already intuitive and user-friendly editing client.
The LMS allows users to directly embed document files, such as PDFs and Word files, as well as images, audio, and video files. It also supports alt text and different heading levels.
Testing it Out
It was a slow week for our team, and I didn’t have anything pressing on my to-do list, so I set to work building the content in a sort of “playground” or edit-only section in the LMS; I wanted to make sure that everything I needed to solve my most pressing issues would even be possible first before presenting the idea to the team.
I started with the biggest issue: ever since Flash Player stopped being a thing, we struggled to get the audio files to play in the PDF even before encountering the accessibility issue. We were able to get the audio to play in an inaccessible PDF through some creative maneuvering previously, but that didn’t solve the issue of getting the audio to play for students navigating using a screen reader. After much Googling, re-reading of various accessible PDF forums, and asking members of the Accessible PDFs Facebook group, the best solution I could glean was to host the audio files externally and link out to them from the PDF.
While this solution sounded workable, it also struck me as a frankly annoying user experience. Really it should’ve struck me then that we could simply host the entire thing online, but it was almost as if I forgot the LMS existed. To be fair to myself, I’m not faculty, so while I have used the LMS in the past, our team sticks mainly to creating things in Word and Adobe.
Our LMS supports MP3 and WAV files, so I first checked to see what file format our audio clips were in. They are WAV files. I dragged and dropped to upload, and it went off without a hitch! The button works, and they are navigable via screen reader.
Fast-forward to the final product: all media files are embedded and navigable, video transcripts have been uploaded, CC has been activated in the Vimeo links, content has been edited where needed for this new format, and everything is looking and working flawlessly. We present our solution to the Liberal Arts team. Their issue is that there’s too much scrolling, and students might get fatigued. Ugh. Back to the drawing board!
So now our designer is trying a different accessible format whose abilities really blow Acrobat Pro out of the water—a reflowable ePub made in InDesign. This requires a bit of coding knowledge, so we’ll need to learn and consult with someone else on staff who knows more about coding than we do. Stay tuned for how that turns out!
The Humble Pedant 