The problem with PDFs

It's time to let go of the PDF!

In the past, PDF documents were often used because they were considered more secure than many other formats. Additionally, PDF files were sometimes used because they were smaller files than other formats, making them easy to upload to, and download from, the LMS.

However! because PDFs can now be edited or converted into editable formats – and passwords and other restrictions can be removed online – PDFs no longer offer any security advantage over other more accessible formats. Moreover, there are multiple reasons why PDF files present accessibility issues to some students.

PDFs no longer offer any security advantage and present accessibility issues to some students.

Read on to learn how to mitigate these accessibility issues by choosing formats other than PDF to provide information in your subjects.

What issues do PDFs present?

PDFs do not work well with different screen sizes and orientations

PDFs are not responsive to different screen sizes and orientations, which means they often require manual zooming and scrolling to access. This can be particularly frustrating for students with motor impairments and those who use mobile accessibility features such as voice control or touch alternatives.

PDFs do not work well with screen readers

PDFs are also next to unreadable for students who use screen readers. Many PDFs are completely unreadable by screen readers, while for others text may be read out of order, or without a recognition of sentence or paragraph structure, making them very difficult to access meaningfully. Alternative text for images often isn’t accessible at all.

Uploading PDFs of readings can breach copyright

Scans of book or journal pages are likely to breach copyright rules, and there's another problem: Student Equity and Disability Services (SEDS) depend on reading lists to find and remediate inaccessible readings quickly. If they have to trawl through LMS pages to find readings, the delay for students in getting accessible readings can be much longer, creating stress for the student and placing them behind their peers.

What can we do to avoid these issues?

Try other file formats

If size is a concern for you, consider other options for reducing file size in Word or PowerPoint before uploading the document to the LMS.

You can make a start on improving your subject’s accessibility by converting your existing PDF files into Word documents using Nitro or Adobe online. You can then make the files more accessible using the Accessibility Checker in Word.

If you currently have a lot of content in PDFs in your subject, eliminating this file type completely may seem like a huge task. A simple way to approach this is to convert one file a week, or if you have a tutorial team, you could use some of your teaching budget to get files converted. If you have the original Word document, the ‘conversion’ is as simple as uploading the Word version instead.

Remediate the PDF

If you can’t avoid a PDF, you can make it more accessible by adding tags. Tags give a PDF document a structure that defines the logical reading order of the elements, allows alt text for images, and makes (some) sense of headings, lists and tables. The screen reader experience won’t be perfect, and some issues should be expected, such as difficulty putting footnotes into a coherent structure. Tags can be added by editing your document with Nitro PDF Pro (PC) or Adobe Acrobat (Mac).

If your PDFs are scans of book or journal pages, they will most likely not be accessible at all by a screen reader.  You can use optical character recognition (OCR) to turn the files into text that might be somewhat accessible, but the success of the OCR process is largely dependent on the quality of the scan. Manually correcting text and adding tags will greatly improve the screen reader experience, but it is time consuming.

The good news: using the LMS is a simple and preferred option for making materials accessible

The most accessible (and the University’s preferred) format for learning materials is publishing content directly in LMS pages. Pages in Canvas are scalable for different screen sizes, can be navigated using the keyboard alone, and, by using some key techniques, can be made very screen-reader friendly.

For readings, a simple solution is to link to the web version of the reading wherever that is available. Use the reading list offered by Readings Online. The Readings Online team can advise on linking to accessible formats and ensuring you are not breaching copyright.

Resources and references