Micro-learning Accessibility, Instructional Design 01:35
Series: The Accessibility Minute-ish Episode 4 of 4
A PDF without tags—or with the wrong tags—is basically just a picture of text to a screen reader. If you want your documents to be accessible, you need to make sure the "skeleton" behind the scenes actually matches what's on the page.
Video
Welcome to The Accessibility Minute. I am your host, Alx Sanchez, and today we are building better documents.
Welcome to the matrix. Today we are looking at a visually dense PDF flier in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Visually it looks great, but watch as I move my cursor to the far left edge of the screen and click the tags icon, which looks like a little price tag. This opens the tags panel, expanding a complex tree like structure of brackets. This reveals the hidden skeleton of the document. The only thing a screen reader actually sees every piece of text needs a tag.
First, I will click the H1 tag in the list, and a purple box highlights our main title on the page. Perfect. Next I will click the tag right below it.
The panel says P for paragraph. Even though the text on the page is clearly a bold subheading. To fix this, I just right click that P tag in the panel, select properties and in the dropdown menu change the type from paragraph to heading level two.
Boom! Structural integrity restored a PDF without tags or with the wrong tags is just the picture of text.
Open that left hand tags panel, check your skeleton and make sure your headings are actually headings.
That is your accessibility minute. Remember to inclusion starts with proper structure.
See you next week.