Accessibility isn’t a privilege. It is a feature we all need to prioritize when designing or creating any forms of content. Ensuring document accessibility means ensuring that your documents are usable by people with various disabilities, including those who rely on assistive technologies to engage with digital content. Your content should be compatible with screen readers, include appropriate text alternatives for images, and be structured to facilitate navigation.
PDFs were originally designed for the printing industry. Due to this, PDFs focus on visual appearances rather than logical structure. This posed a great challenge for accessibility. Before 2004, PDFs did not support tags, which are necessary for defining the document structure. The absence of this structure posed significant challenges to creating accessible PDFs.
Inspired by its mission to provide accessible content to everyone, PDFix developed a cutting-edge library that transforms static PDFs into responsive documents. This library intelligently identifies and structures elements such as tables, lists, paragraphs, and headings, ensuring seamless readability across all devices. This innovation benefits individual users and companies managing large volumes of PDF documents, enhancing both efficiency and accessibility.
The big challenge for the creation tools is really to implement the accessibility stuff into the PDF creation process. I’m not sure if your tool is able to cover all the accessibility standards and put all the data into a PDF. If you have such a tool, then you’re one of the best companies in the world!
Jozef Baranec, PDFix CEO
The historical lack of structure in PDFs: Challenges for accessibility
- No inherent structure: Early PDFs did not have tags or a logical structure, making it difficult for screen readers and other assistive technologies to interpret the content accurately.
- Visual focus: PDFs were designed to maintain the exact visual appearance of documents, which often meant that text and images were placed precisely on the page without any consideration for how they would be read by assistive technologies.
- Late introduction of tags: Tags that provide a logical structure to PDFs were introduced much later, around 2004. However, by that time, a vast number of PDFs had already been created without these tags.
Solutions for PDF accessibility
Automated processing and remediation
PDFix offers automated solutions to identify and structure elements within existing PDFs. Their library can detect tables, lists, paragraphs, headings, and other elements, adding the necessary tags to make your document accessible. This automated process significantly reduces the time required for manual remediation.
Creation tools with built-in accessibility
Venngage focuses on integrating accessibility features into your content creation process. By embedding accessibility checks, such as color contrast ratios and alt text generation, directly into the tool, we help users create accessible documents from the start. This reduces the need for remediation later and ensures that content is accessible as it is being created.
Education and training
Both PDFix and Venngage share the mission of educating content creators about accessibility. By raising awareness and providing easy-to-use tools that highlight accessibility issues during the creation process, creators can learn to produce accessible documents without extensive additional effort.
Legal standards and regulations
Legal standards, such as PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility) and other accessibility guidelines, are now in place to ensure that digital content, including PDFs, is accessible. These standards provide a framework for what needs to be included in a PDF to make it accessible, guiding both the creation and remediation processes.
The structure that is represented in the PDF must define what is a word. That’s the basic because the words don’t have to be a word in the PDF – it’s just a set of characters that is placed somewhere. You visually see that down next to each other and you consider it as a word. This is not right in the PDF. This doesn’t exist. So these words must be constructed first, then you construct paragraphs, and then you construct lists, based on the layout. You should construct even tables. You can imagine a table which is usually a set of of random parts that are somewhere in the content and somewhere else in the content, you have a set of letters that are precisely laid out in some table or structure. This structure must be found. There are a lot of tools that can help us identify this structure but all the information must be put back into the PDF to make it accessible and then the screen reader can consume this data, consume the structure to read that for blind people.”
Jozef Baranec, PDFix CEO
Future & Upcoming Trends in PDF Accessibility
Advancements in PDF standards
The recent publication of new standards for PDF accessibility by the PDF Association in collaboration with ISO aims to address current challenges and improve the overall accessibility of PDFs.
Automated alt-text generation
The use of AI to automatically generate alt text for images within PDFs. This feature can significantly enhance the accessibility of documents by providing descriptive text for visual elements, making them accessible to screen readers.
AI for complex elements
AI can also be used to identify and describe more complex elements within PDFs, such as tables and mathematical formulas. This can help ensure that all content within a PDF is accessible, even when it includes intricate or specialized information.
Personalized accessibility solutions
Jozef from PDFix mentions that almost every client and document set is unique, requiring tailored accessibility solutions. AI can play a role in customizing the accessibility features for different types of documents and user needs, offering more precise and effective solutions.
Integration of AI in creation and remediation tools
The potential of integrating AI into content creation and remediation tools. For example, AI can be embedded in document editing software to provide real-time accessibility checks and suggestions, making it easier for creators to produce accessible content from the start.
AI can also enhance automated remediation tools by improving their ability to identify and correct accessibility issues in existing documents quickly and accurately.
Ongoing improvement of AI models
As AI continues to evolve, we expect the accuracy and effectiveness of AI-driven accessibility solutions to greatly improve over time. Currently image recognition and alt text generation have already significantly advanced. We’ve seen the current models achieve approximately 90% accuracy as compared to 80% accuracy just six months ago.
Integrating AI into PDF accessibility tools is an encouraging development, offering significant improvements to the accessibility of digital content. As AI technology continues to advance, it is expected to play an increasingly vital role in ensuring that PDFs and other digital documents are accessible to all users.
Want to watch the full conversation between Eugene and Jozef on document accessibility? Here it is:
