From the course: Creating Accessible PDFs

Check PDF accessibility

From the course: Creating Accessible PDFs

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Check PDF accessibility

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- [Instructor] So, how do we really know when a PDF file is accessible? There's a certain degree of PDF accessibility that relies on a human, such as you or me, to walk the tags tree of a document to ensure that content is tagged correctly, and that the tags are in the correct order. And that's a really important step, but we also need a tool that can dive into our file and identify any issues in an automated fashion. For this task, we require PDF Accessibility Checkers to evaluate our documents and let us know its status. Now, I talked earlier about walking the tags tree, and that really involves coming in here, going through the tags tree and making sure that everything is in the correct order, and making sure that everything is tagged appropriately. And again, that's a super important step. Now regarding checkers, Acrobat does have a checker built into the application, and you could find that checker by accessing your accessibility tool. If you're not seeing this, you can come over here to the tools tab, scrolling down to the protect and standardize category, and you can add that tool to your tools over here by clicking the add button. Now, if you click on the accessibility tool, you'll notice there's an option called accessibility check. I'm going to click on that, and I'm going to leave this set to its default, and I'm going to click the start checking button. And you'll notice that the Acrobat checker checks seven different categories of your documents, including your headings, lists, tables, alternate text, forms, page content and document. And you'll notice there's two issues in here. They are really just warnings letting you know that you as a human, need to check these on your own. Now, the thing about the Acrobat checker, is that the Acrobat checker does check for common problems in a document. But the challenge with the Acrobat checker is that it doesn't actually check to any recognized standard. I would say that it loosely checks to the WCAG standard, but definitely not fully. So to really check your document, we need to reach for a more powerful tool. And throughout this course, I'm going to be leveraging the PAC 2021 checker. PAC stands for PDF Accessibility Checker, and this is the latest release of the product. Now I'm going to grab this 0203 document, and I'm going to go ahead and drag it over here, and I'm going to check this document for compliance. Now I've already remediated this file, but you could see that it currently passes all of the possible checks and it is PDF/UA compliant, and it is also WCAG 2.1 compliant. Now what's great about the PAC checker is that we can click on results in detail to dive in and analyze any errors that may appear. What's also great about the PAC checker is that I can click on the logical structure button and I can evaluate the tag structure in here, just like I do in Adobe Acrobat. Over here on the right, I can click on the page view, and now as I click through this, I can see the objects as they are highlighted in the document. I can also click on the Artifacts Tab and I can evaluate any Artifacts that appear on each page. Now, another great feature of this product is down here I can click on the screen reader preview. And what screen reader preview does is it renders your document the way that a screen reader would evaluate it. It organizes the content in the order that it appears in the tag structure, it also identifies each element on the left with the tag that's applied to it, and it makes it super easy to evaluate the order, and how that content is tagged. So it's a great tool to leverage as you are evaluating your document. Now, the final way in which we can check PDF accessibility, and it's one that I really want to stress. The reason we're making these documents accessible is because they're going to be read using assistive technology. So the best way to check your document is to read the document or at least sections of the document using JAWS or NVDA to ensure that the content is being read correctly. Throughout this course, I'm going to be using the PAC 2021 checker, and even occasionally the Acrobat checker, to evaluate the files that we remediate, and to ensure that they are accessible.

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