WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

E-mail List Archives

Re: Full URLs in PDF documents

for

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Feb 27, 2023 10:13AM

Good question. I've wondered about the best way to manage these as well,
Christine.

In the case of footnotes and references, I currently retain the full URL
and generally don't add any extra coding.

In some cases, though - especially when a full URL appears in the main
body of a document - I have added alternative text to the link that
matches the page title of the actual page that is linked in the URL.
Whether or not that is useful depends on the intended audience and
context of the document where the URL appears. So I use my judgment by
examining the context on a case-by-case basis. I'm curious how others
manage this.

If I'm able to recommend edits to the actual text being tagged, then I
encourage content creators to precede such URLs by the actual page title
in the regular body text, rather than relying on alternative text. That
way the URL then appears after a colon or in parentheses following the
title of the page referred to, which makes the URL more readable and
understandable for everyone anyways.

For a URL that appears in a full citation like in an academic footnote
or bibliography, I don't add any extra tagging. In those cases, the
title is already included in the same location in plain text, so I
figure any extra info in tags is redundant.

Also, I would note that for any PDF that is intended to be printed, the
inclusion of full URLs can be very important, since a user may need to
manually type in the full URL from a printed page. So there are some
cases where I think the purpose of the document requires that you
absolutely should include a full URL, even if it is clunky and awkward
for everyone.

Phil.

Philip Kiff
D4K Communications

On 2023-02-27 11:47, Christine Hogenkamp wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> My team and I were discussing URLs in PDFs and instances where you might
> have the full URL instead of a descriptive text for the link, such as
> footnotes or references section in a report. The discussion was whether it
> was OK to have an occasional instance of a full URL like that as-is, or
> whether there are any steps we should take in the formatting of the URL (ie
> InDesign has an alt text option we could place descriptive text or
> instructive text). The question was basically, was it too annoying or
> cumbersome for the reader to have to listen to the whole URL?
>
> My opinion in the matter was that I thought it was OK to have a full URL
> as-is, as long as the URL was in a place where the reader could get context
> why the URL was there (ie under a header "References" or similar) and my
> feeling about full URLs is that most screen reader users would probably
> know how to skip to the next element on the page, if they found themselves
> listening to "H T T P colon backslash backslash W W W ..." etc. so that we
> wouldn't be trapping them in having to listen to the whole URL.
>
> I also thought it might not be ideal to use alt text because that's not how
> the text presents visually, so that might be confusing to users who can
> read some of the visible text themselves but also use a screen reader too
> as additional help. Usually our goal is to have the screen reader
> experience match the visual experience, as much as reasonably possible.
>
> So I welcome any thoughts on this, since so many of you are more
> experienced in accessible PDFs than I am and have dealt with all the little
> particular elements and how they should be formatted. Thanks in advance!
>
> *x*
> *Christine Hogenkamp (She, Her)*
> Front-end Developer
> ContextCreative.com <http://contextcreative.com/>;
> > > >