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Re: Full URLs in PDF documents

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From: Karen McCall
Date: Feb 28, 2023 3:52AM

I agree. When I teach accessible/tagged PDFs, I have links in the body of the document/content have Alt Text so that the flow of reading/comprehension is not interrupted when using screen readers or TTS tools.

I approach citations differently. Footnotes and Endnotes are references and I don't use Alt Text for them. Their role in the document is to provide the reference sitsite/citation.

While we can skip over long web addresses using keyboard commands, it gets tricky if the long web address is in the paragraph instead of at the end. We're never quite sure if we've skipped some text while trying to skp the long web address. I also think that someone not using a screen reader would be able to hover the mouse over the link and see the Alt Text in the body of the text which would mean that they didn't have to search the long web address to see where it would take them. 😊

This is why we can't specify that "all links" are treated the same way in a document/content. We have to look at the role that link playes in the document. Is it part of the body text or a TOC or is it a reference?

As I think I've stated on this list before, adding Alt Text to links in a TOC breaks the TOC for those using screen readers unless we add the page number reference to the Alt Text. Thinking of a TOC that goes on for pages, this is just too much remediation needed in addition to creating an accessibility barrier.

Cheers, Karen