The Hidden Accessibility Violations in Online Documents
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Most PDFs contain hidden accessibility violations that make them inaccessible for individuals with disabilities and put your organization at risk for non-compliance with accessibility laws. Discover the hidden accessibility issues in your online documents that, if left unchecked, can result in serious consequences.
Digital accessibility isn’t just about building an ADA-compliant website. Everything you use to connect with your audience needs to be accessible for people with disabilities. That includes web-delivered documents like Adobe PDFs (Portable Document Format), spreadsheets, and presentations.
Online documents often have hidden accessibility barriers that put organizations at risk. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and dozens of international non-discrimination laws, all web content must be accessible — and for many businesses, documents are a particular point of concern.
The good news: Many accessibility barriers are easy to fix. But in order to limit your legal risk and provide a better user experience, you need to know how to check your documents while authoring them.
In this article, we’ll provide an overview of the best practices for web-delivered documents. We’ll also explain how common barriers impact your users and how you can build a better approach to document accessibility.
Document Accessibility 101
Document accessibility is a set of practices that makes electronic documents more accessible for people with a wide range of abilities, including readers who have low vision, color vision deficiencies, and cognitive disorders, along with people who use assistive technologies like screen readers.
That may seem like an overwhelming goal, but there’s an international standard for accessible document design: the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). While WCAG is primarily used to test web content, it can be applied to all types of digital content.
WCAG conformance puts you in an ideal position for compliance with major accessibility laws, including:
- Title II and III of the Americans with Disabilities Act, which apply to state agencies and private businesses, respectively. The Justice Department has opined that the ADA applies to web content.
- Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which applies to federal government agencies and their contractors.
- The European Accessibility Act, which follows POUR principles, similar to those outlined in WCAG.
- The Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA), which applies to most businesses that operate in Ontario. Other provincial Canadian accessibility laws also use WCAG standards.
It’s important to note that document accessibility isn’t optional for digital compliance. Even if your website meets every single WCAG standard, an inaccessible document may be a violation of the ADA — and if you’re using that document for an important interaction (for example, collecting tax information from users or providing crucial product information), it’s an obvious target for an accessibility lawsuit.
Consequences of Inaccessible Online Documents
So, what happens if you’re PDFs, PowerPoints, Microsoft Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, or other web-delivered documents aren’t accessible?
For starters, you’ll reach a much smaller audience. In the United States alone, about 61 million adults live with disabilities — that’s roughly 25% of the adult population. If your documents aren’t usable or readable for a quarter of your potential audience, you’re excluding a huge percentage of your audience.
And as we’ve discussed, most brands have a legal obligation to make resources available to all users. Poor document accessibility can create risks for organizations of all sizes. Here’s a few examples:
- Under the ADA Title III, any person with a disability can file lawsuits against businesses that discriminate against people with disabilities. Those lawsuits can easily lead to thousands of dollars in court costs and settlements.
- The Department of Defense can also file lawsuits on behalf of consumers with disabilities and assess financial penalties. The ADA allows for fines of up to $150,000 for major violations.
- International laws such as the AODA and the EAA may also allow for fines and lawsuits.
- Inaccessible documents typically have lower engagement rates — and a negative impact on your brand reputation.
1. Missing or Incorrect Headings
When you’re authoring a document, you might choose heading levels (H1s, H2s, and so on) based on their visual appearance. That can create major issues for readers.
Here’s why: Screen readers use headings to determine the structure of a document. When that structure is in place, the user can “skip" to different parts of the document.
Best Practice: Use headings in a hierarchical order (H2 tags should always appear after H1 tags, H3 tags should appear after H2 tags, etc.) Avoid visual headings — text formatted to appear as a heading that lacks proper tags.
2. Visual-Only PDFs
If your PDF documents are simply visual scans of paper documents, they likely are not compliant with WCAG accessibility standards.
Why? There’s no text in the document — just a picture of text. This commonly occurs during mishandled document conversion projects. Screen readers can’t fix that issue, and users can’t change the typeface or font size to fit their preferences.
Best Practice: If you must upload a scan of a paper document, use optical character recognition (OCR) tools to provide readers with a text version. Be sure to check the results as well.
3. Insufficient Color Contrast
When text doesn’t have enough contrast with its background, it’s difficult to read. For some people with low vision and color vision deficiency, it may be impossible to read — but everyone benefits when text meets WCAG’s minimum color contrast ratio.
Best Practice: Use color contrast checkers to check color pairs against WCAG guidelines. The tool tests the luminance (brightness) of text against background colors, which is expressed as a contrast ratio.
Aim for a minimum contrast ratio of 4.5:1 for basic text. Be sure to test all of the text in your document, including the text on embedded charts, graphs, figures, and images.
4. Non-Descriptive Links
Many PDFs, Word documents, and other online documents contain hyperlinks, which need to follow the same rules as the hyperlinks on standard web pages. WCAG Success Criterion 2.4.4, “Link Purpose (In Context)” requires that the purpose of each link can be determined from the link text alone or from the surrounding text.
When documents fail to meet this guideline, readers won’t know what will happen when they activate the link.
Best Practice: Avoid generic link text like “click here" or “learn more” and opt for more descriptive link text. Make sure that your reader can understand the purpose and destination of each link without relying on visual context.
5. Missing or Low-Quality Alt Text
Alternative text (or alt text) describes visual content (most commonly images, but also graphs, charts, and other figures) in plain text. It’s useful for people who use screen readers, but it’s also helpful if visual content fails to load or render.
Best Practice: Write concise, descriptive alt text for every image. Avoid using terms like “image of" or “picture of,” since screen readers will already identify the content as an image.
6. Tables Without Proper Markup
Tables are a great way to organize complex data, but if they're not properly structured, they become an accessibility issue for assistive technology users. A screen reader will read a table cell by cell, row by row — and without the right markup, it won't understand the relationships between those cells.
Think about it this way: A sighted user can visually scan a table and instantly understand that a particular cell is the intersection of a specific row and column (e.g., "Sales" for "Q3"). A screen reader user needs the document to explicitly define those relationships.
Best Practice: Use your document editor's built-in table features to create tables. Do not use tabs and spaces to visually simulate a table.
Ensure that your tables have properly defined header rows (and header columns, if applicable). These headers tell screen readers which cells contain the identifying information for each data cell. In programs like Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can designate header rows. Check your specific software for instructions.
7. Improperly Formatted Lists
Just like headings and tables, lists need to be created using the correct structural markup. Simply using dashes, asterisks, or numbers followed by text doesn't create an accessible list.
While assistive technology users may be able to understand the content, the output may be confusing or annoying. Screen reading software might treat the “list" as a single block of text, announcing all of the text without pausing for each item.
Best Practice: Screen readers rely on proper list markup (<ul> for unordered lists, <ol> for ordered lists, and <li> for list items) to announce the presence of a list and the number of items it contains. This allows users to navigate the list efficiently, skipping from item to item.
You can implement that markup by using your document editor's built-in list tools (bulleted list or numbered list) to create lists. Avoid manually typing numbers or symbols.
How to Find and Fix Accessibility Issues in Online Documents
Whether your organization has dozens or thousands of online documents, you need a comprehensive testing strategy to ensure document accessibility. The best approach is multifaceted: By combining automated tools with careful manual review, you can find hidden accessibility issues and improve compliance.
Automated and Manual Document Accessibility Testing
Automated accessibility tools scan documents for common issues that have simple pass-or-fail rulesets. For example, they can determine whether contrast ratios fail to meet WCAG 2.0 standards or whether images are missing alt text.
Many document editors have automated accessibility tools built-in. Adobe Acrobat has a “Create and verify PDF accessibility" feature, for example, which tests content against WCAG and PDF/UA-1 standards (which are closely aligned with WCAG). Microsoft products (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote) have an Accessibility Checker that performs a basic review and outlines areas for improvement.
But while automated tools are powerful, they can't catch everything. Some accessibility issues require human judgment and an understanding of context. For example, automated tools can detect if an image has alt text, but not whether that alt text is any good.
Manual testing involves interacting with your document as a user with a disability might. You can perform a basic manual test by navigating the document using only your keyboard (no mouse). That can help you find issues that might impact assistive technology users:
- Can you access all interactive elements (links, form fields, buttons)?
- Does the document have a logical reading order (or tab order)?
- Is the table of contents accurate?
If you’re testing large numbers of documents or complex documents (for example, documents with interactive elements and multimedia), a professional accessibility audit is highly recommended.
Create Accessible, Compliant Online Documents with AudioEye
It's vital to remember that accessible documents are not just a best practice – they're a requirement. Compliance with accessibility laws like the ADA, Section 508, the EAA, and the AODA hinges on making all digital content, including documents, accessible to people with disabilities. Ignoring document accessibility leaves a significant gap in your user experience and leaves you vulnerable to non-compliance lawsuits.
That’s where AudioEye comes in. With our three-pronged approach to accessibility, AudioEye ensures all your digital content, including web-delivered documents are accessible and compliant. Our powerful combination of AI-driven automation technology and audits with experts from the disability community enable you to achieve industry-leading compliance with accessibility standards, lowering your legal risk and improving the overall user experience.
Plus, AudioEye’s Document Remediation Services, overseen by our team of accessibility experts, thoroughly test your web-delivered documents to help you quickly achieve document accessibility at a cost that works for your business.
Ready to take the next step toward accessible PDFs and digital content? Get started today with a free web accessibility scan.
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