PDF Accessibility

[cody...@gmail.com]

Hi friends, hope all are well.

 

I work for a company that offers remediated content. We have one particular customer consistently asking for PDF format because, I’m quoting, “it’s the most accessible for all users”. I’ve personally never had great experiences with PDF, and doing research yielded very conflicting information including issues with reflowability, but I’m only one human with one perspective. So, I’m wondering what y’all think. Can a fully accessible PDF be made? Including reflowability and the ability to change font? Does anyone have one that is sharable as a sort of Proof Of Concept? The group perspective is greatly appreciated. Thanks kindly for your time.

    All the best,

    Cody Care

 

[Mujtaba Merchant]

Hi Cody,

 

Thanks for reaching out. Unfortunately, I don't have a ready document to share as I'm currently at home and most of my work documents are at the office. Plus, they're confidential.

 

From my experience, creating an accessible document involves preparing an accessible Word document with our content and then saving it as a PDF. I think the shortcut to save as PDF is ALT + F + Y, but it's not working on my home computer for some reason.

 

Regarding your question, a fully accessible PDF can be made, but it requires proper tagging and structuring. PDFs can be made reflowable and font sizes can be adjusted, but it's crucial to follow best practices during the creation process.

 

If you're looking to create accessible PDFs, I'd recommend starting with an accessible Word document and then converting it to PDF using the "Save As" PDF feature. This way, the PDF will inherit the accessibility features from the Word document.

 

HTH, have a good one!

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[azhar...@gmail.com]

Hi,

 

I agree with most of the points mentioned by Mujtaba.

 

It is possible to create fully accessible PDFs, but most of the time people either do not know or they do not have the tools to create accessible PDFs. Therefore, 90% of time we come across  PDFs that do not work with screen readers.

 

For simple documents, as suggested,  the best way is to create an accessible Word doc and then convert it to PDF. The easiest way to convert is to hit F12, then hit tab to choose document type, hit P to get PDF and press enter.

 

All the best.

 

Azhar

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[Quentin Christensen]

It also depends on your needs.  I agree that starting with a Word document and exporting that to PDF tends to work quite well (Note that I think the shortcut has changed - several times - so you might need to press ALT+F then arrow down your file menu either to export then save to PDF, or in mine currently I can press alt+f and "Save to PDF" is right there near "Save" (It is, in Microsoft's infinite wisdom, alt+f, y, 3..... because of course it is....)

What I was going to say re your needs though, is the original intention of PDF was a document that DIDN'T change and looked identical for everyone who used it.  That was really the only reason to push that format over say, just sending someone the Word document...

But yes, if your client insists on a PDF file, that can be made accessible.  The main offenders for bad PDFs are files which are scanned with office scanners and turned into PDF files which are essentially just photographs of the page.  Properly created PDFs can be quite accessible, although I know we do often find various formatting like tables etc may not work the same as in other formats.

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/nvaccess.org/d/msgid/nvda-users/009d01dc2d85%24149c7350%243dd559f0%24%40gmail.com.

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[kers...@montana.com]

Hi,

 

I would suggest to your client that consider HTML or EPUB instead of PDF. There is the WordToEPUB add-on freely available from the DAISY Consortium that can create both HTML and EPUB.

 

Happy to contact me off list for more info.

 

Best

George

 

 

From: nvda-...@nvaccess.org <nvda-...@nvaccess.org> On Behalf Of cody...@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 24, 2025 11:41 AM
To: nvda-...@nvaccess.org
Subject: [NVDA] PDF Accessibility

 

Hi friends, hope all are well.

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[Kristin Maling]

Hi Cody,

I'm new to this list so coming into this conversation a little late. I work in web and document remediation. PDFs can definitely be made accessible. In any document-based remediation I do, PDFs are always the final deliverable (as they're typically for posting to the web and thus they need to be made accessible for compliance under AODA, ADA, etc.). Can a PDF be 100% accessible—that's a loaded question. It all depends on the content, how the source of the PDF was built, how flexible the client is to rework content, etc. For example, complex tables can be very difficult to make accessible (and I can't rely on users having a table-based add-on to make things work, etc. I target NVDA with default settings, no add-ons, as my baseline for screen reader testing), or sometimes a table may "look" correct to a sighted user, but structurally, to a screen reader, required elements may be missing. If the client is willing to go back to the source and modify the content and/or table, then that can help. But there are times where content is "locked" by the client and that isn't possible (this is often the case when working with tables for financials in annual reports and the accountant requires the data in a certain way, even though it's not accessible). In this case, I would propose an option to "artifact" the table (making it "invisible" to a screen reader) and instead present the data to screen readers in a natural language format. I often do this with more complex charts and graphs as well. There's a lot of work that goes into making a PDF accessible, and a lot of factors that go into what making it accessible means. But it is definitely doable, and just as important, from a compliance perspective, as making a website accessible (especially if those PDFs will be hosted on that website).

Sometimes I'm also tasked with remediating the source (a Word document, an InDesign document, etc.), but a final PDF is always required. The problem with making the source accessible is that if the final product is going to be a PDF, there's always going to be manual work that needs to be done to the PDF, no matter how well the source is set up. So this is a discussion I have with the client when they ask for accessible source files. If the intention is so they can make updates to the source on their own, and export to an accessible PDF, they need to be aware of the additional work that needs to be done to the resulting PDF to make it accessible (which requires a full Acrobat Pro license for access to the accessibility tools and the know-how to use them). It's not as simple as exporting from an accessible Word or Indesign file—no matter how well it's set up for accessibility—and get a PDF that's going to be accessible "out of the box". That said, if I have access to the source files, I'll always work with them to make them as accessible as possible. That way, when I export to PDF, there's less manual work that needs to be done in Acrobat (and this really pays off when I client comes back with changes that need to be made to the source).

Anyway, this isn't really an NVDA-based discussion, so I'll leave it at that for now, but I'd be happy to chat more about this offline if you want.

Thanks,

Kristin.