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

for

From: Philip Kiff
Date: Feb 18, 2025 9:24AM

That's a helpful corrective/clarification, Ryan, thanks.

When testing a PDF for accessibility, one of the manual checks that I do
is to tab through links and form controls to make sure they work and
that the order makes sense. I haven't really paid any attention to focus
indicator colours when I do this. Maybe I should start to pay at least a
bit of attention to those as well, if I'm going to be tabbing through
the links anyways.

Phil.


On 2025-02-16 4:39 p.m., Ryan E. Benson via WebAIM-Forum wrote:
> 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
>>
>>