The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a law that focuses on eliminating discrimination against individuals with disabilities in public places. ADA Title III covers businesses called “public accommodations”, such as colleges, stores, banks, hospitals, and restaurants.
In 2018, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said that websites also count as “public accommodations” under the ADA. This means websites must be easy to use for people with disabilities like vision or hearing problems. It is important to know that the ADA also applies to other parts of businesses’ online spaces, not just their websites. This includes things like emails, videos, and documents online, such as PDFs.
Why Should PDFs be ADA-Compliant?
PDF, or Portable Document Format, is a popular way to share documents online. A PDF document has different parts, such as paragraphs, images, and tables, and each part is tagged. Assistive technologies, such as screen readers and text-to-speech devices, use these tags to convey the document properly to people with disabilities. The ADA document remediation guidelines require PDFs to be fully accessible to assistive technology.
Unfortunately, most PDFs are not tagged efficiently. Such untagged PDFs create information barriers for people with disabilities.
Read More: Types of PDF Standards and Compliances
How to Create an ADA-Compliant PDF?
When you make an accessible PDF, remember these tips:
- Choose the Right Language: Make sure your PDF is set in the correct language. This helps screen readers understand the text correctly and avoids confusion.
- Begin With an Accessible Document: If you can, start with a document that is easy to access. Then, change it into a PDF while keeping its accessibility features intact.
- Use Clear Headings and Structure: Arrange your information with clear headings and in a way that makes sense. This helps readers navigate through the document and grasp the content easily.
- Add Descriptions for Pictures and Charts: Make sure all important images, charts, and other non-text elements have descriptions. This helps people who use screen readers understand what is in the images.
- Tag Tables and Forms Correctly: When you use tables and forms, tag them properly so they are easy to navigate. Tables should have header rows and columns labeled correctly. Remember to use specific tags, like for the whole table and individual rows.
- Ensure Good Color Contrast: Make sure there is enough contrast between your text and background colors. This helps everyone read your content, especially people with vision problems like color blindness. To learn more about how color contrast works in ADA-compliant documents, you can check out our guide here.
- Use Easy-to-Read Fonts and Consistent Formatting: When creating PDFs, it is important to use fonts that are easy to read and keep the formatting consistent. This ensures that everyone can access the information without any difficulty.
- Make Links Easy to Understand: Hyperlinks in your PDF should have clear and descriptive text so that readers know where they will go when they click. This is especially helpful for people using assistive technology.
- Ensure Accessibility: After finishing your document, run a check to find any accessibility problems. This helps ensure everyone can use your PDF without trouble.
Read More: Common PDF Accessibility Errors to Avoid
Industries That Utilize ADA-Compliant PDFs
- Education Industry: Schools and universities can make PDF versions of textbooks and handouts so that differently abled students can easily read them.
- Government Agencies: These bodies can create PDFs of reports and brochures that follow ADA guidelines, making them accessible to everyone.
- Healthcare Industry: Hospitals can make PDFs of patient forms and consent forms that meet ADA standards, allowing patients with disabilities to understand and fill them out.
- Businesses: Companies can produce ADA-compliant PDFs like employee manuals and marketing materials, ensuring all employees and customers can read them.
- Law Firms: They can make ADA-friendly PDFs of legal papers like contracts and court filings. This means including things like alt text for images and clear headings so that people with disabilities can understand them too.
What Happens if Your PDFs are not Accessible?
If digital documents do not meet the ADA accessibility rules, they could become targets for lawyers looking to make quick money through lawsuits. These lawyers sue document owners and often win cases easily, leading to hefty settlement costs.
On average, settling a lawsuit after getting an accessibility demand letter can cost $5,000, and some companies end up paying over $25,000. From court decisions to digital rights activists, most agree that digital documents should be accessible to people with disabilities. Not following the rules is more costly and troublesome than just making documents accessible in the first place.
How to Check if an Existing PDF is ADA-Compliant
PDF-generating platforms give the facility to check PDF compliance through their in-built features.
For example, Adobe Acrobat offers a dedicated Accessibility Tool that simplifies the process of evaluating your PDF for accessibility compliance. This feature can be accessed through the Tools panel and is designed to help identify elements that may hinder accessibility for users with disabilities. Rather than reviewing each component manually, the tool performs an automated check and highlights areas that may require attention. These may include:
- Images lacking descriptive alternative text.
- Disordered or illogical reading flow.
- Inadequate color contrast between text and background.
- Improperly structured headings that affect document navigation.
- Use of fonts that are not screen reader–friendly.
- Untagged or incorrectly tagged elements that disrupt accessibility.
However, these built-in tools for accessibility checking are not foolproof. You need a comprehensive accessibility solution that not only identifies issues but also fixes them. Here’s when a tool like PREP can help you!
How can PREP Help in Creating an ADA-Compliant PDF?
PREP is a PDF remediation tool that processes inaccessible documents and extracts data with the help of advanced AI technology. It ensures efficient data conversion into a logical format by understanding the context of each document.
Apart from this, it also provides customized solutions for unstructured data. The compliance guidelines undergo updates frequently, and these constant updates can make it challenging to keep up with compliance manually. However, the robust built-in ADA-compliant accessibility checker and PDF checker in PREP validate the document’s compliance with the WCAG and ADA guidelines. PREP can automate the remediation of complex documents in multiple formats at affordable prices and a quicker turnaround time.
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