Web Accessibility 101

Does It Really Have to Be a PDF?

by Bob Ahern

A great number of the PDF documents published on the web really shouldn't be PDFs at all. Many of them should be html documents formatted with cascading style sheets, perhaps using PDF as an additional format. There are far too many documents on the web that are published in only the PDF format.

Any document on the web that is basic text and graphics using standard fonts should really be published as html and css.

In the opinion of many, PDFs are largely unnecessary; but, there are situations in which a document should be a PDF. When these situations arise, it is the responsibility of the document author to make the PDF fully accessible.

Cases in which a PDF should be chosen as the document format include:

• Documents with a legally restricted format, like U.S. tax forms.
• Documents that combine accessible and inaccessible versions, such as a scan of a document that also includes accessible text. Examples include a historical document scan that must remain intact, or a legal document that includes stamps, seals, handwritten signatures or initials, and other non-text elements.
• Interactive forms that must match format with a printed version, or that must be printed and signed as part of the completion and submission process.
• A record of a document’s state at a particular moment in time.
• Documents that must be published with security settings that restrict the reader’s digital rights of printing or copying content.
• Documents intended solely for printing.
• Documents that include significant footnoting or endnoting, since these cannot be easily accomplished in web markup.
• Documents with character sets that cannot be suitably rendered in web markup, such as a specimen of an unsupported typeface, certain mathematical formula notation, or a language whose glyphs cannot be rendered.

If you are creating a document to be published on the web, and that document does not easily fit into one of these cases, you should ask yourself whether the PDF format is appropriate. Even if it is, ask yourself if the document should be in only PDF format. Could and should the information also be provided in a more accessible format?

To learn more about creating accessible PDFs, please view our course outline Creating Accessible PDFs.