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Re: Accessibility assessment of pdfs.

for

From: Steve Green
Date: Oct 24, 2012 4:11PM

As with all automated testing, the CommonLook tool can only perform some of
the necessary tests with certainty. For instance it may be able to tell if a
document does not contain any headings at all, but if there are heading tags
it can't tell if they have been applied properly. It can check that images
have alternate text but it cannot tell if that text is appropriate.

To test PDFs fully, it is necessary to do some degree of manual testing, and
that is often prohibitively expensive. If that's a route you want to go
down, we offer that service as do others on this list. Fixing them is even
more expensive, and again there are several of us who can help with that.

Where you have a lot of legacy PDFs, a pragmatic approach might be to test
them all with an automated tool and test a small sample manually to get a
general assessment of the quality of tagging (if indeed they are tagged).
You will then know how good they could be made and if they are fixable at
all - sometimes they are not, depending on how they were authored.

Next, look at your server logs to see how often they are downloaded and
which are the most popular. If the figures are high you may choose to fix
the most popular ones. The rest I recommend you leave, and put a notice on
the website saying you will provide an accessible version on demand within a
reasonable timescale.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd