WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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RE: Examples Needed for Alternatives to PDF Docs

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From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Jun 22, 2005 1:48PM

> We have over 350 PDF documents that are currently accessed
> from our educational web site. I realize that we need to
> provide alternative HTML docs to these PDF docs in order to
> provide accessibility to everyone.

At that point, I'd consider just replacing the PDFs and just going with
HTML. You can't get much more accessible than well formed and structured
HTML.

That said, there isn't really a magic way to go from PDF to accessible HTML.
One option, if the PDFs came from source documents like MS Word, you may
want to provide the original MS Word files as an alternative, as they can
(not necessarily, but often are) actually more accessible to things like
screen readers than the PDF might be.

-Darrel