Accessible Documents

A Practical Approach to Document Accessibility

Documents are used across the University – in courses, HR processes, reports, public websites, forms, and administrative communications. Making documents accessible ensures that students, employees, and visitors can obtain the information they need.

Prioritization

Improving document accessibility is an ongoing process. Universities maintain large collections of documents created over many years, and it is rarely practical to remediate every existing file immediately. The most effective approach is to focus on the materials people rely on most while building accessible practices into new content.

A helpful way to think about this is:

• Start with the documents people actively rely on. 
  • Course materials, forms, instructions, and other frequently used resources should be prioritized for accessibility improvements.
• Improve documents when they are updated or reused. 
  • When documents are revised, redistributed, or used again in a course or process, take the opportunity to address accessibility issues.
• Create new documents accessibly from the start. 
  • Using accessible practices when creating new content prevents accessibility barriers and reduces the need for future remediation.

Rather than starting with trying to remediate everything, consider the following progression.

Reduce Unnecessary PDFs

If a document is outdated, duplicative, or not essential, consider removing it. Reducing the number of PDFs – especially older or scanned files – is often the fastest way to improve accessibility.

Choose a Different Format

When creating or sharing new content, consider formats that are easier to make accessible:

• Canvas pages
• Library resource links
• Microsoft Word documents
• Web pages

These formats allow accessibility features like headings, lists, alt text, and descriptive links to be applied more easily. For instructors, this may mean posting readings as Canvas pages rather than scanned PDFs. For administrative units, this may mean using web forms instead of downloadable PDFs.

Improve PDFs That Must Remain

If a PDF must be used, it can be evaluated using accessibility tools such as PAC 2026 available in the Company Portal (formally Software Center) for Microsoft machines. It is helpful to understand that PDF remediation typically does not change the visual appearance of a document. Instead, remediation adds underlying structural tags (headings, reading order, alt text, table markup, etc.) that assistive technologies rely on. If a PDF originated from a scanned hard copy, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) must be run before accessibility improvements can begin. Fully remediating complex PDFs can require specialized expertise, tools, and significant manual work.

It is also important to keep in mind prioritization. Start with your most important and most used PDFs that affect key aspects of courses or other critical university business functions.

Professional Remediation (When Necessary)

Ohio University does not currently provide a centralized in-house PDF remediation service. If a document must remain a PDF and requires full remediation, departments may choose to work with an external remediation vendor. Because remediation can be time-consuming and costly, prevention is strongly recommended whenever possible.

Preventing Future Accessibility Issues: The 7 Core Skills

The most effective way to improve document accessibility is to build accessibility into documents from the start. The 7 Core Skills for Accessible Content emphasizes practical techniques that apply to all document types, including Word, PowerPoint, Canvas content, web pages, and future PDFs:

• Use proper heading structure
• Create descriptive links
• Add meaningful alternative text to images
• Use simple tables with proper headers
• Ensure sufficient color contrast
• Use lists correctly
• Make audio and video accessible

When these skills are applied to source documents, any future PDF generated from those documents is significantly easier and more affordable to make accessible.

Summary

When it comes to document accessibility, our focus is to:

• Reduce unnecessary PDFs
• Use more accessible formats whenever possible
• Prioritize improvements to documents that must remain
• Build accessibility into new content from the start

Ensuring digital documents are accessible is part of the University’s responsibility under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). Focusing on these principles ensures that information remains accessible while reducing the need for (and cost of) complex remediation later.