WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: Document Accessibility Analysis (like the WebAIM Million but for documents)

for

From: L Snider
Date: Sep 29, 2021 8:52AM

I have thought about this in the past...but the document checkers are
usually program based, Word, PDF (except PAC and others like it), etc.
Websites are easier this way, as they all have to use HTML code for
the base, so they can be easier to check (generalization).

In my experience 90% of documents fail on the most basic things-even
in disability organizations and governments. Both the PDF and Word
checkers are limited in what they check (you do have PAC though for
PDF/UA but most people have never heard of UA). Plus, personally,
accessibility for me is far more than the checkers, they don't cover a
lot.

Things have improved slightly within the last 5 years for document
accessibility, but with Acrobat being so hard to use (I used it since
it came out and still don't understand why a PDF has three or more
layers), PDF accessibility is way harder than it needs to be. If EPUBs
could use any browser as a viewer, they would take over from PDF-in my
personal view...

WCAG was created to work with everything digital, but most legislation
messed that up because it focused on websites (and I would argue WCAG
examples for each criterion and the focus still is on websites in my
personal opinion)...which was fine until 2007-8 ish, and then the
digital world changed. Websites are only one slice of the pie. Robots,
documents, apps, virtual reality, etc. have been the future for a long
time...

Just my two cents, others may have different mileage!

Cheers

Lisa

On Wed, Sep 29, 2021 at 10:46 AM Elizabeth Thomas < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Does anyone know of a large-scale document accessibility analysis?
> Something like the WebAIM Million <https://webaim.org/projects/million/>,
> but for documents? So maybe an analysis of the top (insert any number here)
> most downloaded documents. Download the documents, run them through an
> automated checker, and log the issues in some sort of database (or even a
> simple Excel worksheet).
>
> Does that exist? Is anyone working on something like this right now? If
> not, I think I found my next side project...
>
> -Elizabeth Thomas
> CPACC, ADA
> > > >