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Re: Accessible PDF Question

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From: Duff Johnson
Date: Apr 10, 2025 10:08AM

I agree with Philip.

From the description, this case seems likely to be a text-book example of content that’s optimized exclusively for visual purposes without regard for accessibility.

The advice Paul and I offered comes from the place of having to deal with whatever the designer did (past tense). But you cannot fix every accessibility problem with tagging.

Precisely as Philip notes, the better solution is to back up and reconsider the design to ensure that it doesn’t exclude users before worrying about the tagging.

Duff.

> On Apr 10, 2025, at 11:32, Philip Kiff via WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
>
> Paul and Duff provide helpful tagging suggestions.
>
> I would add a note of caution about the use of colouring, shading, and bold alone in the visual design - regardless of whether it is a PDF or a web page. Folks who are colour-blind or who have low vision may find background shading difficult to distinguish. Likewise relying solely on the distinction between heavy vs regular cell outlines or on bold vs plain text to signify something important to visual users can create problems.
>
> Technically, if the background shading is strong enough to pass minimum colour contrast guidelines, then such a design can pass accessible testing. And using bold vs plain will usually also be considered to pass minimum guidelines. Not sure how I would evaluate the use of heavy cell outlines vs regular ones.
>
> But while they might minimally "pass" some tests, I'd still generally advise caution about relying only those specific design elements for visual users, and try to find a way to create more distinct differences - changes in font, dashed vs solid lines, capitalization vs lower cases, fully reversed colours, etc.
>
> Phil.
>
> On 2025-04-10 10:16 a.m., Brian Lovely via WebAIM-Forum wrote:
>> [....] I'm looking at a pay calendar PDF for a client. Each month is a table, and each day of the month is a data cell. [....] They also have a background color to indicate days they are closed, and a heavy data cell outline to indicate pay day.
>