WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Business case for making PDFs accessible (is there one)?

for

From: Bevi Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Oct 12, 2010 6:00AM

Birkir wrote:
... but is there additional business benefits that could be used to sell the
tagging to organizations. ... With web accessibility a reasonably strong
case can be made with lower maintenance cost and SEO, but to what extent can
that be claimed to apply to pdf documents. ...

Lower maintenance costs and SEO benefits are pretty much the same for PDFs
and Word / Office documents as they are for traditional websites.

But don't overlook the internal benefits. In an internal website or
intranet, the company's employees will be able to find documents faster and
therefore be more productive.

Also a well-tagged document can be easily transformed into XML, which is the
default markup language for content management systems (CMS), digital asset
managers (DAM), or whatever centralized database system a larger company
would use to manage its internal information.

These are all major plusses to any business because they have the potential
to reduce costs while improving external marketing and internal productivity
of its employees.

Birkir wrote:
... Are there possibilities for automatic exporting of data from the
document or other benefits that could be touted as a result of doing the
extra work on the documents themselves? ...

The savings in cost and time is incredible when the original source document
is structured and tagged correctly before the PDF is made. Make a
well-formed Word document or Adobe InDesign layout, for example, and then
export it to PDF using the correct export settings and you've got a very
accessible PDF right from the start. Take about 5 to 15 more minutes of time
to add some extra touches to the PDF to complete the accessibility.

That's a LOT quicker than trying to remediate PDFs that were made from
poorly-constructed Word documents, which can sometimes take hours to fix
their accessibility problems.

But to accomplish this, Word and InDesign users must learn how to use their
software tools to create well-formed source documents. These are not
ordinary training classes! At this time I know of only a handful of other
trainers in the U.S., including myself, that teach these techniques, so that
knowledge is not wide-spread.

— Bevi Chagnon

: : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : : :
: : : : : : : : : : : : :
Bevi Chagnon | PubCom | <EMAIL REMOVED> | 301-585-8805
Government publishing specialists, trainers, consultants | print, press,
web, Acrobat PDF & 508
Online at the blog: It’s 2010. Where’s your career heading?
www.pubcom.com/newsletter

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Birkir Rúnar
Gunnarsson
Sent: Tuesday, October 12, 2010 5:40 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] Business case for making PDFs accessible (is there one)?

Hey there good listers

I am campaigning to make government and major commercial organizations in my
home country of Iceland do something about the accessibility of their
documents (forms and other public documents).
PDF is the format of choice and I know it can be made very accessible with
correct and sufficient tagging.
Of course there are accessibility and equal rights reasons to encourage the
extra work be done to achieve document accessibility, but is there
additional business benefits that could be used to sell the tagging to
organizations.
Are there possibilities for automatic exporting of data from the document or
other benefits that could be touted as a result of doing the extra work on
the documents themselves?
With web accessibility a reasonably strong case can be made with lower
maintenance cost and SEO, but to what extent can that be claimed to apply to
pdf documents.
If anyone has dealt with a similar problem or has ideas they are always
welcome.
Thanks
-Birkir