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GAAD Webinar Wrap-Up

Wow! What a great #GAAD webinar! 

Thursday, May 16th, DubBot and our partner Lullabot co-hosted "Web Accessibility Q&A: Simplicity, Testing, and Remediation," which featured a fantastic panel of accessibility professionals from Iowa's Department for the Blind, Lullabot, DubBot, and Providence College.

Topics ranged from what's new in WCAG 2.2 and the new DOJ mandate to distributed publishing environments and accessibility education resources.

One topic that sparked a lot of interest was PDFs. 

An audience member raised a question about the recent DOJ mandate that all web content must be accessible. Specifically, how does one make a website fully accessible, especially when working with content like PDFs?

Claire Ristow, from Lullabot, was quick to respond by first discussing the two most common issues with PDFs, which are:

  • When a PDF is actually a scan of a document, it is just an image with no data or ALT text—a screen reader cannot access it.
  • PDFs are difficult to remediate, and the source document—Word, PowerPoint, etc.—is often unavailable. 

The panel then discussed possible solutions for getting large numbers of PDFs under control, accessible, and manageable. Those solutions included:

  • Separate into two groups - PDFs that need complete do-overs and PDFs that need minor tweaks. Use resources for the low-hanging fruit first.
  • Convert all PDFs into HTML. Claire Ristow, from Lullabot, stated, "That is going to be a big task…" "So it is definitely a process, but it's an important one because usually there's a lot of important information in PDFs."

Everyone agreed that PDFs present accessibility barriers and are challenging to remediate, even for seasoned professionals. 

To drive the point home, Penny Kronz from DubBot, commented, "...using Adobe and PDF is just so much more complicated than a WYSIWYG (or Content Management System, CMS) will ever be because you can't actually access the source of what is being put in the back end of that PDF. ​​I just think HTML is so much more reliable, and it's just funny that something that is so proprietary, Adobe, PDF, that it's just isn't better."

Another question posed by an attendee received a lot of expert advice as well. The question was, "Do you have any advice for implementing a site-wide review process working with site administrators or owners who are hesitant to make content changes?"

The responses addressed both the human and business aspects of accessibility:

Kerri Hicks, from Providence College, responded, "But one of the things that has made our accessibility initiative successful is having tools and then using those tools to develop these personal relationships with our editors and our content providers so that they realize that this is a people issue, not just a technology issue."

Penny Kronz made this observation: "So I do think that, as Carrie mentioned the relationship aspect of it is important to get the buy-in, but showing it as the business case that is SEO, all of your users' usability. I'd like to say accessibility is usability."

Clearly, there were a lot of great questions from the audience and a lot of great "nuggets" of advice from our accessibility experts, and this blog post only scratched the surface.

Maggie Vaughan, CPACC
Content Marketing Practitioner
DubBot