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.
During the webinar, a vibrant discussion unfolded about PDFs, exploring their advantages and disadvantages. In this blog, I want to take that conversation a bit further and delve a little deeper into the pros and cons of PDFs.
Let's Start with the Pros
Portable Document Format (PDF) is considered a destination file format, meaning a source document, usually a word processing document like MS Word, converted to a PDF.
PDFs were designed specifically for print and thrived in the early 1990s when information flowed through paper. Their strength lies in preserving layout across environments, making them ideal for static documents meant to be printed, not for web browsing.
A few other good things about PDFs include:
- PDFs are platform-independent and typically smaller in size (if primarily text-based), making them easy to store, transfer, and download.
- PDFs can be more secure than standard HTML or Word documents, offering advanced security features like encryption and password protection.
- PDFs allow for offline access to content.
PDFs certainly filled a need at the time. Still, as the Internet has grown and digital information sharing has become the norm, PDFs have not kept pace with the "need for speed," usability, and accessibility we expect while traversing the internet.
The Cons
The only reason content should be offered as a PDF on a website is to provide it as a resource file for users to print.
Unfortunately, PDFs are used for everything from restaurant menus, newsletters, and viewbooks to registration forms, org charts, and telephone directories.
"Need for Speed"
There are several reasons a PDF can be slow to download:
- Large amount of data
PDFs can contain a lot of data, which can slow down the download. - Orphaned objects
PDFs can contain objects that were associated with the source file. - Large images
Images that have a final destination in PDF should be optimized the same way as for HTML.
Usability
Despite their widespread use, PDFs can create usability hurdles for several reasons:
- PDFs are not mobile-friendly because they are not created using responsive design.
- Some PDFs are actually just big images embedded in the document. This happens when a hard-copy document gets "scanned as a PDF."
- Users can not bookmark and share specific pages within the PDF.
- If a Google search points you to a PDF, you often need to search within the PDF itself to find the relevant content.
Accessibility
PDFs were never intended to be online content; therefore, this are no native accessibility features built in. An inaccessible PDF shares many of the same characteristics as an inaccessible webpage:
- No machine-readable text.
- Missing alternative text for images.
- The language definition tag is missing.
- Headings are missing or in the incorrect order.
- The document title is missing.
- Text can not be resized.
- Either not tagged or tagged incorrectly for use by a screen reader.
- Text can not be resized up to 200 percent without loss of content or functionality.
There are many techniques and best practices for creating a more accessible PDF. First, make sure your source document is accessible before converting it. I've included several links to resources that I hope will help you in your accessible PDF journey.
DubBot is also here to help. Our application can scan the PDFs on your website and identify accessibility-related issues so you can begin the remediation process.
PDFs were never created with the intention of being a resource on the web. The issue, as I see it, is not the PDF itself; it's the challenge of moving beyond thinking of PDFs as a one-size-fits-all solution.
