Adventures in Technology Enhanced Learning @ UoP

Tag: document structure

PDFs: Particularly Dependable Format? Pretty Dull, but Functional? Or Profoundly Dreadful Files!

Introduction

PDFs aren’t something I’d normally spend much time thinking about (I much prefer swimming or learning the guitar in my free time). The format barely existed when I was doing my undergraduate degree, so when I came to my Masters 20 years later, I was thrilled that there was this simple way to get all my reading material on my computer or iPad. OK, it was mildly exasperating that it was fiddly to highlight or copy text for my notes, but it was a small price to pay for how readily available all the information was.

However, a recent meeting with the European Ally User Group has given me a whole new perspective on PDFs. It raised various questions about how useful they are, from both an accessibility and a study skills perspective.

The problem with PDFs

In the best-case scenario, an accessible PDF can be created from a Word document by including things like alt text to describe images and using appropriately styled headings. A screen reader should be able to cope with a PDF generated in this way.

But even in this best-case scenario, PDFs are not ideally suited to online academic reading and research. Students will struggle to annotate, highlight, or copy-and-paste parts of the text without downloading extra apps. Regarding accessibility, PDFs do not address needs for changing fonts or colours. And most PDFs are designed to be printed on A4 rather than viewed on a screen – the size doesn’t change automatically to suit the device and browser, so the user will have to rely on zooming and scrolling horizontally as well as vertically. 

What about the worst-case scenario? This would be where a page has been scanned to produce a PDF. As well as exacerbating the issues described above, screen readers may not be able to get any useful information since the text will just be an image, rather than readable characters.

There is some help available: students can use Blackboard Ally to transform PDF files to a format that suits their needs. However, this isn’t 100% reliable as I found in some experiments with older, scanned PDFs. For example, using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on a PDF with what appeared to be a shadow effect on a title resulted in double letters, changing Week 1 to WWeeeekk 11. There were also some unfortunate effects from tables – where a cell spanned two rows, it shifted all the data in the first row into a column to the right. But anyone using a screen reader would already be having issues with these documents anyway. So wouldn’t it be nice if students didn’t have to rely on this kind of fix – if the file was already conveniently available in a form that would work for all users?

Solutions

Let’s start with the bare minimum – avoiding the worst-case scenario and making sure that PDFs are nicely structured for screen readers. When creating your own PDFs from Word, follow these general accessibility principles:

  • add alt text to images (right-click an image and select ‘alt text’)
  • avoid tables unless they are necessary (and don’t merge cells)
  • use styles for formatting headings and text to improve page navigation and give structure to the document (proper use of styles will change your life, I promise – see this Quick styles video for how to use them if you don’t already)
  • in Word, click on ‘check accessibility’ from the Review pane for additional recommendations
  • use ‘save as PDF’ or ‘export to PDF’ rather than ‘print to PDF’ to preserve the document structure and any hyperlinks (ensuring you’ve selected ‘Document structure tags for accessibility’ under Options) 
  • if you have access to Adobe Acrobat Pro, you can also run an accessibility check with this, which will give helpful suggestions for fixing any issues

If you’re using a scanned file, have a look for an online text version. If you can’t find one, as a last resort you may be able to use optical character recognition to update scanned PDFs. Unfortunately, this will not work for mathematical notation – formulae are notoriously difficult to make accessible.

But can we do better than that? Well, why not move away from PDFs entirely? A potentially really accessible alternative (for your own content, at least) is to consider putting it in a Moodle page or book rather than locking it inside a PDF. This will have the bonus for you that you’ll be able to edit it easily whenever necessary – and if another lecturer takes over a module from you, they’ll be able to easily update this content. You can also use the selection of lovely formatting styles in the page content editor under the teardrop icon 💧 to improve the page appearance while maintaining accessibility.

Final thoughts

Throughout the Ally webinar that I mentioned at the start of this blog post, participants were sharing their institutions’ PDF policies and recommendations in the chat. These included promoting the use of ePubs, converting all PDFs to HTML, providing both PDF and HTML alternatives, or recommending linking to accessible Google docs instead. The general feeling was very much one of PDFs being on their way out – and no one sounded sad to see them go. Would you miss them?

If you’re interested in accessibility in Moodle, contact Tom Cripps (tom.cripps@port.ac.uk) for more information and support.

Credit Image: Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/young-troubled-woman-using-laptop-at-home-3755755/

Accessible documents – How easy it is to read your digital document?

What sort of question is that that you might ask – but to someone who is visually impaired and possibly using screen reader technology, documents can vary significantly in their usability. By creating documents with a few small changes it is possible to improve their usability for everyone.

When we download a file from a web page or receive an email attachment, the majority of us can do a quick visual scan of a document to find the information we want. However, if there is no structure (where a larger font size and bold text has been used for headings), those using a screen reader will need to read the whole document to find the relevant parts – a time consuming process with a long document. Searching for a particular word/words could also miss relevant information. Adding structure will make the whole document navigable – easily done by using styles to construct a hierarchy of headings that can then be used to create a table of contents.

It might seem a chore to have to set up styles before starting to write your document, but spending a few extra minutes creating styles for documents longer than a few pages could assist all readers, whether or not they are visually impaired. Once you have set up styles or modified existing default styles, you will then be able to save time in the future and use this file as a template for further documents.

Here are some of the most basic things you could do to make a document more accessible:

  • Use a clear sans serif font of at least 12 point such as Arial, Calibri or Helvetica
  • Use a hierarchy of heading styles to add structure to your document that will also enable easy creation of a table of contents:
    • heading 1 – title
    • heading 2 – chapters
    • heading 3 – sections
    • heading 4 – sub-sections
  • Create a table of contents for longer documents with sections
  • Avoiding adding a blank line at the end of paragraphs using a hard return on your keyboard – incorporate space after a paragraph using paragraph styles instead
  • Insert a page break at the bottom of a page rather than adding a few blank lines
  • Text that is aligned left and not justified is easier to read
  • Use high contrasting colours between text and the background
  • Reverse text (a light colour text on a dark background) is difficult to read so is best avoided
  • Busy backgrounds cause problems reading text so using a plain one is preferable
  • Use Alt Text (alternative text) for any images in your document to describe the feature for those using screen readers

Bearing these points in mind when creating a document should only take you a little extra time and just doing these few simple things could make a big difference in usability for the reader.

Some helpful links:

Ways to make your Word document more accessible:
http://webaim.org/techniques/word/

The Accessibility Color Wheel allows you to try out different text and background colours:
http://gmazzocato.altervista.org/colorwheel/wheel.php

Adding Alt Text to your Microsoft document:
https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/Add-alternative-text-to-a-shape-picture-chart-table-SmartArt-graphic-or-other-object-44989b2a-903c-4d9a-b742-6a75b451c669

Suggestions for creating accessible PDF documents:
www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-publish-on-gov-uk/accessible-pdfs
https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/creating-accessible-pdfs.html

So, next time you start a new document, why not think about making it easier to read!

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