A young man with intellectual disability looks at accessible content on a phone

Creating accessible PDF documents

January 21, 2022

Making PDFs accessible

PDFs are commonly used but can present a barrier to access for people with disabilities. If you use PDFs on your website or in digital communications, here are tips to ensure you create an accessible PDF. Best practice also suggests that you make an alternative form of the information available. This can be done in

PDF and accessibility issues

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is not considered an “accessible technology” by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) as it cannot provide an equivalent experience for a person with a disability to that of a person without a disability. As a result, the AHRC recommends the incorporation of accessibility features in PDFs to improve accessibility for some PDF users, and that an accessible alternative is also provided.

Document accessibility is important to people with the following disabilities:

Blindness
Colour-blindness
Low vision
Deafness
Motor impairments
Cognitive impairments

Accessibility needs to be considered both when creating a PDF and when publishing a PDF on the internet.

PDF requirements

Requirements for PDF accessibility include, but are not limited to:

PDFs should always have an accessible alternative, such as HTML, Word, Text or RTF
PDFs must be tagged with accessibility features, such as:

Headings and text
Alternative text for images
Tables and lists;
Bookmarks; and
Links

PDF forms must be coded with accessibility techniques
Page numbers must be specified for consistency across PDF readers
The document title and language must be specified
Bookmarks must be used in addition to headings to navigate content; and
All text must be searchable (i.e. the PDF is not a scanned image).

HTML requirements

Requirements for HTML accessibility include, but are not limited to:

PDF must be published with an equivalent accessible alternative (HTML, Word, Text or RTF);
The link to the alternative version must be placed adjacent to the PDF link;
PDF (and its alternative) link text must:

be purposeful, descriptive and meaningful;
indicate the target is a PDF;
not use ASCII characters, ambiguous words (e.g. ‘more’, ‘here’), or device-dependent words (e.g. ‘click’); and
be consistently presented for all downloads.

What we're doing to help

We create user-friendly, accessible HTML documents as an alternative to PDF. Get in touch to talk about your content and how you can develop HTML alternatives. There are a range of options to help you host the content too, to help make it simple and fast.

See our demo HTML webpage here.