Testing and updating your digitized documents, like PDFs, is something often overlooked. These documents must also be compliant with accessibility guidelines, and BoIA can help.
Accessibility Standards for Documents
You may not realize that documents have a specific structure, and that there specific tags and labels that are required to ensure your documents can be read by assistive technology. These elements are critical to certifying that everyone has equal access to the documents on your website and anyone using assistive technology is able to correctly interpret the meaning of the document.
The goal of these standards is to define content and structure within information found on the Internet and within Internet-based documents separately so it can be displayed appropriately on a variety of different devices. These standards allow for text extraction by screen readers and other assistive technology by taking advantage of the logical structure of the document that includes chapters, headings, paragraphs and sections as well as elements such as figures, tables and footnotes. (Learn more on the W3C website here.)
We work with your team to ensure accessibility of various document types including:
- Adobe PDFs (.pdf)
- Adobe InDesign (.indd)
- Microsoft Word (.doc, .docx)
- Microsoft Excel (.xls, .xlsx)
- Microsoft PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx)
Remediation of current documents is not the only option that we offer. Our professionals work closely with your team to maintain future compliance by offering training to document creators and other team members.
