WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: questions re converting PDFs to HTML (WordPress) and accessible footnote plugins

for

From: Chagnon | PubCom
Date: Nov 4, 2016 10:47PM

I noticed that many of the article PDFs on the agency's website are from other publishers, such as medical journals.

You need to check with the publishers of these articles to verify that they'll let you republish their material in another format (HTML versus their PDF and with a different appearance) or you could violate their copyright. Keep in mind that as you convert them from PDF to HTML, regardless of the tool you use, you could be altering the content or the conversion could mistakenly alter it, such as dropping characters or special symbols.

PDFs can be made accessible. Ideally, the accessibility should be built in the original source file, which could be either Word or InDesign. Then the PDF is mostly compliant needing only minimal remediation in Acrobat Pro.

--Bevi Chagnon