Posted on by Catriona Morrison in Design and development
Tags: Inclusive Design Principles, WCAG
Digital documents and book files are a core part of our everyday communication. When documents aren’t accessible, they can exclude people with disabilities from integral learning, information, and content. Publishing accessible documents and book files ensures we can communicate the same information to people with disabilities, making this content accessible to everyone.
In this article, we cover common accessibility barriers, laws, standards, and formats relating to accessible documents. Later on in the series we'll cover the foundations of accessible document design and how to apply them in different authoring tools to document formats.
Accessible documents are files that can be read, understood, and navigated by people with seeing, hearing, moving, and thinking disabilities using different types of assistive technology and adaptive strategies.
Common accessibility barriers that affect people include:
Global accessibility laws require many sectors and services to provide equal access to documents that are:
Various laws around the world shape accessibility requirements for products and services in different regions. The common global framework referenced by these laws for assessing accessibility is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). By creating documents that aim for WCAG Level AA compliance you ensure documents are in line with requirements across the world.
Different regions and laws are as follows.
The Equality Act requires organisations to make ‘reasonable adjustments’ to ensure services are accessible. The Equality Act considers digital access to services, meaning documents like PDFs, are within scope.
The PSBAR requires all digital content hosted by public sector bodies that receive public funding, including universities and local authorities, to meet WCAG 2.2 Level AA. To find out more, read our post public sector accessibility regulations and amendment to the Public Sector Accessibility Regulations.
The EAA requires digital products and services sold in the EU to be accessible and meet EN 301 549, which adopts WCAG 2.1 Level AA as its means of compliance.
The EAA specifically addresses the accessibility of digital documents hosted by public and private sectors. Digital books and reading applications are defined as services, meaning EPUB and PDF files must be accessible too. To find out more about the European Accessibility Act, read our Understanding the European Accessibility Act (EAA) and European Accessibility Act (EAA) FAQ posts.
Section 508 requires all federal agencies and institutions to ensure their electronic content, whether online or downloadable, is accessible.
The ADA Title II update requires state and local government bodies, including public libraries and universities, as well as vendors supplying content such as learning materials and ebooks, to ensure their digital content is fully accessible by 26 April 2027, meeting WCAG 2.1 Level AA.
Developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), WCAG defines a framework of principles and guidelines that ensure digital content is perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. The majority of global legislation references WCAG 2.1 Level AA as a means of standardising a level of accessibility. For a deeper dive into WCAG, read our WCAG Primer.
Although WCAG was originally written for open web content (HTML/CSS/Javascript), the guidelines aim to be technology-neutral. This means, they also apply to digital document formats such as PDFs and EPUB files. Not every success criterion is applicable, as in some instances, success criteria reference markup and HTML directly, which are not used in PDF or Word document files.
Some of most applicable success criteria for digital documents are:
Building on the WCAG success criteria, the W3C also published Guidance on Applying WCAG 2 to Non-Web Information and Communications Technologies (WCAG2ICT) which aim to help clarify how to apply the web-technology focused criteria to “non-web ICT”, including PDF and Microsoft Word documents files.
These WCAG success criteria, alongside WCAG2ICT guidance, help establish key principles of universal accessible document design. However, many success criteria can still seem confusing or too general when applied to digital documents. To fill these gaps, other format-specific standards exist to expand on and cover additional criteria that help improve accessibility and usability for everyone.
Three common digital formats are:
Each format has its own benefits and challenges when it comes to accessibility. Before creating a document, it's important to consider what the final format should be. If publishing on the web, use the native HTML format wherever possible, as it is the most usable with assistive technologies and adaptable to people's chosen browser preferences.
What all formats have in common is that accessibility needs to be considered from the start. It’s much easier to build accessibility in as you create a document than to try to fix issues at the end of the process.
Microsoft Word documents are often the source file for many other formats, including PDFs. If accessibility isn’t prioritised in the source document, any issues are often carried through into the exported PDF or other formats.
Microsoft Word includes an Accessibility Checker. This tool can help identify common issues such as missing alternative text, unclear link text, or missing document structure. While automated checkers won’t catch everything, they are a helpful first step in reviewing your work before publishing.
For many organisations and sectors, PDFs and office documents are the most commonly preferred document format. PDF files are fixed for printing, ensuring that document content will always appear the same regardless of which device it is viewed on.
This also means PDFs don’t natively work well with assistive technologies such as screen readers, and they aren't as easily adaptable to people's preferences. When PDF documents are created without accessibility in mind, they will contain accessibility barriers that stop people with disabilities from being able to perceive the document content.
However, It is possible to make accessible PDF documents that are inline with WCAG principles.
The W3C has published 23 PDF-specific techniques for WCAG 2.2, that can be used to ensure that PDF documents hosted on the web meet WCAG. Each technique explores how a way to create PDF content that is inline with a specific WCAG success criteria.
However, whilst the PDF techniques are important in designing accessible PDF documents, they only cover a minority of the WCAG 2.2 success criteria, with none of the failure criterions or general techniques mentioning PDF.
To fill the gaps when applying WCAG to PDF, there is the PDF sub-standard ISO 14289, which is known as PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility). PDF/UA is a PDF standard that provides the framework to ensure a PDF is accessible and compatible with common assistive technologies. It is based off the WCAG 2.0 guidelines but includes PDF-specific requirements.
As its intended as a final format, the majority PDF documents are converted from content created in other authoring tools, such as Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign. The more you do to make the source documents accessible on these authoring tools, the more accessible your final PDF documents will be.
Similar to PDF files, the EPUB format is considered a final file format, meaning it is usually converted from authoring tools such as Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign. However, unlike static PDF documents and book files, EPUB files are made of the same technologies as the web: HTML, XML and CSS. This means, they align more naturally with WCAG principles. There are two types of EPUB file: reflowable and fixed-layout.
A reflowable EPUB is similar to a web page in that it is responsive, meaning it adjusts to different-sized device screens and to preferences in text size and font choices to fit the needs of the user. A fixed-layout EPUB is similar to a PDF, with a fixed page layout, orientation and text size. Fixed-layout EPUBs imitate a print version of the book.
As both reflowable and fixed-layout EPUB files are ebook files, and are predominantly read within a reading system of ebook-reader device, they have further accessibility requirements beyond WCAG. The format-specifc standard EPUB Accessibility 1.1 defines the requirements necessary to make an EPUB publication fully accessible.
Making your document accessible is not only a legal obligation, it is essential for inclusion, increasing good will, and business opportunity. Creating accessible documents will help everyone, including people with disabilities, to read, navigate and understand your content.
If you're currently currently publishing digital documents, our design review service will provide you with our accessibility expertise and guidance to build an accessible experience. If you already have published documents hosted online, our assessments can help you to understand whether your products and services meets accessibility standards.
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