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Re: Can you remove link underlines and focus indicators in PDF documents?

for

From: Ryan E. Benson
Date: Feb 16, 2025 2:39PM

Hi Birkir,

My first question is who is the target audience?

I am going to slightly disagree with Phil. The look of the focus is handled
by the viewer itself, though I guess somebody could write JS to change it,
if they so desired, but more importantly a "Link - OBJR" element is
required to make the link focusable. I believe that most tools
automatically create this these days, but I can't say all. Depending on the
audience, having them tab through a PDF may be something to consider.

--
Ryan E. Benson


On Thu, Feb 13, 2025 at 1:40 PM Philip Kiff via WebAIM-Forum <
<EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:

> Hi Birkir,
>
> On 2025-02-13 12:00 p.m., Birkir R. Gunnarsson via WebAIM-Forum wrote:
> > One requirement is to make sure all interactive elements have a focus
> > indicator. You can easily remove that in a browser but I don't know if it
> > needs to be tested in a PDF document (can the document authors somehow
> > remove the focus outline?)
>
> No, for most "static" PDFs, I don't think you need to test for this. The
> "focus" indicator is not normally something that is written into the
> PDF, but rather something that is applied by whatever software you use
> to read the PDF. Some PDF readers allow users to customize how they want
> links or input fields to appear during interactions.
>
> If you are creating "dynamic" fillable PDFs that use XFA (XML Forms
> Architecture), then I think you would need to test all the interactions,
> including focus indicators. That format gives you a lot of control over
> the user interface. But creating accessible "dynamic" XML forms is
> highly specialized work, and creating accessible forms is always a
> challenge, and not something that can be fixed or tested with basic checks.
>
> On 2025-02-13 12:00 p.m., Birkir R. Gunnarsson via WebAIM-Forum wrote:
>
> > The other check is to make sure that links in a block of text are
> > underlined. Again, can the author of a PDF document do things like
> removing
> > default underlines from links or bookmarks?
>
> Definitely you should check that links are underlined or otherwise
> indicated clearly. Most PDF software allows creators to remove such
> marks - there is an actual setting called "invisible" that you can apply
> to a link annotation in a PDF. When applied, the only way that some
> users can discover the links is when they happen to hover their mouse
> above the relevant piece of text. I would follow current WCAG best
> practices when interpreting whether links require underlines in a PDF or
> if some other visually distinct indicator is acceptable. Underlining and
> colouring in blue is the most widely recognized method for standard PDF
> text documents.
>
> Phil.
>
> Philip Kiff
> D4K Communications
>
>