Guidelines: Remediation on PDFs

This article will describe how to create accessible PDFs with a checklist for all items you need to address.

First Steps for PDF Remediation

Remediating PDFs for web accessibility can be more time-consuming than creating a webpage. Complex PDFs, such as forms, are even more challenging to make web-accessible.

Clean up and get rid of outdated files.
Ensure PDFs are smaller than 30-40KB.
For the PDFs that you need to keep, see if you can turn them into simple One Stop forms or One Stop articles.

Remediation

The most efficient way to remediate a PDF is to correct accessibility issues in the original source file. This checklist shows how to fix your PDF starting from the original Word document or InDesign file. It also includes instructions to fix a PDF directly in Acrobat.

In cases where you don't have the original source file, you can convert the PDF back into a Word document and edit your document in Word using the Accessibility Checker. Some documents will convert well and others will not. For example, a document that was originally created in Word without too many design elements would be likely to give good results.

Checklist for PDF Remediation

This section lists the steps to create an accessible PDF. Instructions and video tutorials will show you how to create accessible documents in Word, InDesign, and Adobe Acrobat. 