How to Ensure Accessibility in Document Conversion Projects: A Step-by-Step Guide
How to Ensure Accessibility in Document Conversion Projects: A Step-by-Step Guide
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Keeping your digital documents accessible during the conversion process is often overlooked and can negatively impact your user experience. Follow the best practices below to learn how to keep your online documents accessible throughout the conversion process.
The amount of digital files on the internet is astounding. Though the exact number of files is unknown, a conservative estimate is around 15 trillion. This number will only increase as the amount of data on the internet continues to grow, and people find new ways to find and consume information.
When creating or converting these digital files, accessibility is a critical aspect to keep in mind. Individuals with various disabilities, including visual, auditory, cognitive, or physical impairments, can find digital documents inaccessible, preventing them from accessing and consuming their information. Not only does this exclude users from online content, but it also comes with legal risks that could seriously affect your business.
Document remediation services can help improve the accessibility of digital documents, but there are steps you can take to ensure accessibility at the beginning of your document creation or conversion process. We’ll explain those steps in more detail below.
What is Document Remediation?
The purpose of document remediation is to make digital documents — including PDFs, Word files, PowerPoints, and other electronic formats — accessible to all users, particularly those with disabilities. The goal is to ensure the disability community can access and use these documents, and that they conform to the accessibility standards outlined in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
The process usually starts by examining a document’s tagging and “fixing” it so assistive technologies (such as screen readers) can understand and read it. Next, you’ll add additional accessibility features such as adding alt text to images, ensuring correct heading order, including descriptive links, and more.
Once remediation is complete, the digital document and assistive technologies will be more accessible to users with disabilities.
You can either remediate documents manually or by using a document remediation service.
Why Accessible Documents Matter
1.3 billion people worldwide have a disability — yet much of the web is inaccessible to the disability community (only 3% of the world’s top one million home pages are accessible to individuals with disabilities, according to WebAIM). The number of accessible digital documents is even smaller, preventing users with disabilities from accessing the information contained in these documents.
In addition to ensuring all users can access information, making digital documents accessible is important for numerous reasons. This includes:
- Legal requirements: Most countries have established digital accessibility laws, requiring all digital content — including digital documents — to be accessible. In the U.S., for example, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act require organizations to meet the accessibility standards outlined in WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Part of meeting these requirements means ensuring electronic documents are accessible. The European Accessibility Act and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) have similar legal requirements. Failing to meet these requirements can result in legal action, such as lawsuits or demand letters.
- Improved user experience: Accessible documents benefit both individuals with disabilities and those without. By making these documents more accessible, they’re easier to access and use on devices such as mobile devices or tablets or for those with situational disabilities (e.g., someone with a broken arm or with eye strain).
- Broader audience reach: Making your documents more accessible extends their reach to a broader audience — 1.3 billion people, as we mentioned above. With this expanded reach, you can tap into a vast, largely underserved market which can lead to new revenue opportunities.
- SEO optimization: Accessible content is usually better structured than non-accessible content. This makes it much easier for search engines to crawl your content, understand it, and rank it higher.
- Long-term sustainability: Finally, the more accessible your digital content is, the more likely it is to be future-proof. Additionally, structured, well-tagged documents are usually easier to maintain, update, and adapt to emerging technologies, reducing the need for huge revisions down the line.
Here’s the bottom line: Creating accessible digital documents is the right thing to do — from both a legal and user standpoint. Enhancing accessibility for digital documents decreases your chances of being sued for lack of accessibility and, more importantly, ensures all users can access and interact with digital content.
6 Steps to Ensure Accessibility in Document Conversion
With the benefits of accessible digital documents in mind, let’s look at how to ensure accessibility during a document conversion process.
1. Choose the Right Tools
If possible, start the document conversion process with an accessible source document, which you can then export into an accessible PDF. Starting with an accessible document ensures your content is tagged and structured appropriately and, once converted, will retain its accessibility features.
Before you start the conversion process, be sure you’re using the right tools. Look for reliable conversion tools that support accessibility features, including:
- OCR Software: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software is an image-to-text conversion tool. The software can add extra text from your image files or scanned documents and convert them into a searchable, editable PDF. For example, you can convert invoices, legal documents, invoices, or contracts into PDFs using OCR software.
- Document conversion software: Document conversion software allows you to convert a file from one format to another. It can handle various document formats, including text documents, PDFs, images, presentations, spreadsheets, and more. These software types are widely used to ensure compatibility across platforms and improve document accessibility.
- File format converters: Many software platforms include built-in file format converters that allow you to easily change file types without additional tools. Most converters are included in word processors, spreadsheets, presentation platforms, or cloud-based platforms. For example, Microsoft Office Suite allows you to convert digital documents into PDFs, HTML, RTF, or OpenText files directly within the platform. Google Workspace and Apple iWork have similar capabilities.
As you evaluate various document conversion tools, pay attention to their capabilities. Look for tools that will maintain your documents' formatting and accessibility. The right tools can make the conversion process quick and easy; low-quality document converters may result in rework or a poor user experience.
2. Use Tags and Structure Correctly
The tags and structure of your digital documents have a huge impact on accessibility. Tags create a logical reading order, provide structure, and help users navigate through the document easily. Tags also help you comply with accessibility standards, including WCAG, ADA, etc. Your document should include the following tags:
- Heading tags: Heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.) define the hierarchy (or order) of your digital content, breaking it into sub-sections. Following this order and tagging your documents in this way keeps them more structured and improves screen reader navigation.
- List tags: List tags help define the structure of any lists on your site, including bulleted lists or tables. They ensure lists are read as grouped items rather than separate paragraphs, which also helps with navigation and content clarity.
- Paragraph tags: Paragraph tags mark blocks of text as paragraphs, ensuring your content is organized into readable sections which improves clarity and keeps formatting consistent.
- Link tags: Link tags define the hyperlinks included in your document. Tagging links helps screen readers identify them as clickable and where the link will take them.
Using tags and proper headings in your Word documents or PowerPoints ensures when documents are exported, the tags are carried over, maintaining the document’s logical reading order and structure. This also makes a huge difference for assistive technology users, allowing them to easily navigate through your documents by headings, lists, paragraphs, or links.
3. Ensure Good Readability
The readability of your PDFs, Word Documents, or PowerPoints impacts their overall accessibility. Not only should these documents be easy to read and understand, but they should also be easy to navigate — particularly for assistive technology users. To enhance the readability of your digital documents, ensure your documents have:
- An accessible font: Accessible fonts are clear, simple, and easy-to-read. These types of fonts (like Times New Roman or Calibri) help individuals with vision impairments (such as low vision) or cognitive disabilities (such as dyslexia) read content more easily. Overly decorative fonts (like Papyrus or Graffiti) can make it harder for users to read and understand.
- Adequate line spacing and paragraph structure: Ensure your documents have sufficient line spacing and well-structured paragraphs. If text is too crowded or tightly spaced, it can be difficult for individuals with cognitive disabilities to read and understand.
- Appropriate color contrast: A good color contrast ratio can help users easily distinguish between text and background elements, especially for users with low vision or color blindness. WCAG recommends a color contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for normal text and 7:1 for larger text. Consider using a color contrast checker to help you strike this balance.
- Text resizing and scaling: Users should be able to increase or decrease a font size without the text overlapping or the layout breaking. This is especially important for users with low vision who need a larger font size to read text easily.
4. Include Alt Text
Alt text (or alternative text) is a written description of an image that screen readers can read out loud — or convert to Braille — for people with visual impairments, sensory processing disorders, or learning disorders. More simply, it describes what is conveyed in an image, photograph, infographic, or other non-text content so people with disabilities can understand the context.
Any time your digital documents (or other digital content) contain non-text content, it must include alt text as specified in WCAG Success Criterion 1.1.1. Without alt text, users with disabilities may be unable to understand non-text elements, causing them to miss critical information.
5. Establish Good Table Structure and Navigation
It’s not uncommon for PDFs to include tables to present information or data in a visual way. However, to ensure these elements are accessible in your digital documents, they need to be structured appropriately.
Every table should be marked properly for accessibility, meaning you need to include elements that tell screen readers what they are and how to navigate them. Ensure each row and column are tagged with the right tags and each one includes good, descriptive headers. This helps improve readability and navigation for users with disabilities as well as assistive technologies.
6. Test Your Documents for Accessibility
The best way to ensure your digital documents are accessible after conversion? Test them. Whether you decide to test them yourself or use a document remediation service, conducting an accessibility test on your digital documents can help ensure they’re accessible.
We recommend taking a hybrid approach to digital document testing, as it can help you find and fix more accessibility issues (and help you conform with WCAG standards) than a single approach.
For example, AudioEye’s Document Remediation Services first tests your web-delivered documents, including Word documents, forms, PDFs, and PowerPoints, using software. Our platform then automatically fixes common accessibility violations such as missing alt text or low color contrast. We then go a step further, with our team of human experts testing your documents to find more complex accessibility barriers and provide expert guidance for remediation. The approach helps you quickly achieve document accessibility, lowering your legal risk and improving the user experience.
AudioEye: The Key to Effortless Document Remediation
Keeping your digital documents accessible doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Following accessibility best practices at the start of your content creation process streamlines the path to more accessible documents and the path to WCAG conformance. By blending automated and manual document remediation, even the most complex of your web-delivered documents can become easier to navigate, easier to understand, and provide a better user experience for all users.
That’s where AudioEye’s Document Remediation Services comes in. Our services are easy to use, save you time, and ensure all your digital documents are compliant with accessibility laws and provide a good experience for your users. Put simply, if you're looking to enhance the accessibility of your digital documents, AudioEye ensures the process is smooth and efficient.
Ready to get started? Use our free Web Accessibility Checker below and scan your digital files for more than 30 WCAG violations (more than any other tool on the market).
Want to see our Document Remediation Services in action? Schedule a demo today.
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