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

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From: Cliff Tyllick
Date: Oct 23, 2010 10:42PM

Bevi, I agree with your comments about the benefits of making the source documents — Word documents, for example — accessible. I would even say that, even if you never create a PDF, the ease of working with an accessible Word document makes the business case for making documents accessible. The same would be true of other content creation software.

Put another way, if Word is used as a 21st-century word processor, then it's easy to do each of these tasks with the documents produced:
- Automatically generate a complete and current table of contents, as well as lists of tables and figures.
- Automatically update that table of contents as needed.
- Completely reformat the document — for example, by changing the font used throughout — in a matter of seconds.
- Transfer content from one document to another with no concerns about differences in formatting between the two documents. (The content will take on the formatting conventions of the destination document as desired.)
- Add content generated by other authors without having to worry about whether their formatting preferences match those of the current document.

But most people don't produce content as if they are working with modern word processors. Instead, they use the buttons their software makes obvious — buttons that change the appearance of the text without adding any information as to why that appearance is changing. In doing so, they are working like kindergartners equipped with crayons, construction paper, safety scissors, and paste. And the documents they produce are just about that clumsy to manipulate and that difficult to revise. Untold hours are spent in building tables of contents, in fixing formatting errors that arise when a portion of one document is inserted into the middle of another, and so on. If managers could track those wasted hours, they would scream for their employees to create accessible documents.

The key is to make the interface support the task of creating accessible content. In a session at Accessibility Camp DC, I gave folks a glimpse of the toolbar I created to do just that in Microsoft Word 2003. Fittingly, it's called the Accessibility toolbar. People who follow the tips associated with it understand more clearly how to use two powerful tools: styles, to identify the role of text and, with it, the semantic structure of the document; and templates, to determine the document's format. They also have ready access to tools to make tables and figures accessible. What they don't have, so long as they have only the Accessibility toolbar displayed, is the distraction of the two dozen or so buttons on Word's default toolbars that lead them away from creating accessible documents.

I also have a template for Word 2007 and Word 2010 that, when installed in the startup folder, adds an Accessibility tab to Word's ribbon. It's worth noting that each of the functions on this tab is available somewhere else on the ribbon, but no other tab on the ribbon presents all of these features in one group.

These items are not for sale. But, as I told the folks at Accessibility Camp DC, if you would like them, e-mail me, and I will send you a zip file containing the relevant documents — free. They are easy to install and almost as easy to use.

Give people the right tools, and they can do the job right.

Cliff

Cliff Tyllick
Web development coordinator
Agency Communications Division
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
512/239-4516
<EMAIL REMOVED>
>>> "Bevi Chagnon | PubCom" < <EMAIL REMOVED> > 10/12/10 7:00 AM >>>
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

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