Overall Goal

Make all PDFs ADA compliant with the WCAG 2.0 AA standard

Short Term Goal

Make all non-authenticated high profile PDFs ADA compliant, where high profile PDFs are defined as ones that are linked of pages that meet the following criteria

• VCU Homepage

• Unit (College, School, Center, Institute, Dept) homepage

• Pages associated with Admissions, Prospective Students

• Page that appear on the first couple of pages when one does a VCU Search or a public Google search for any of the following terms

• PDF, Admissions, prospective students

Steps to Take

1. Review your site for PDFs.  

2. Remove any and all unnecessary PDFs.

3. Place PDFs intended only for the VCU Community behind authentication (e.g. CAS).

4. Test each of your remaining public-facing PDFs and fix all issues to ensure that they are ADA compliant.

5. Do the same for each of the PDFs that are behind authentication

Assistance Statement

Until you are able to complete steps 4 & 5 above, please place the following statement on each page that contains links to a PDF document that is not yet ADA compliant.

Note:  This is not a long term solution but does provide better customer service.

PDF Resources

508 Checklists and Resources

• https://www.hhs.gov/web/section-508/making-files-accessible/checklist/pdf/index.html
• https://www.section508.gov/create/web-content
• https://www.w3.org/WAI/teach-advocate/
• https://www.pdfa.org/pdfua-the-iso-standard-for-universal-accessibility/ 
• https://commonlook.com/pdf-accessibility-testing-and-verification/ 

How to test your PDF for ADA compliance

There are various tools to choose from including:

• Adobe Acrobat DC

• PAVE (http://pave-pdf.org/)
  Note: Change the language to English (located at the right hand side of top navigation bar)

Create and verify PDF accessibility (Acrobat Pro)

• Step by step instructions to creating accessible PDFs in Adobe Acrobat Pro

Where can I learn how to fix my non-compliant PDFs

There are many sources.   Below are a couple

• Lynda.com: https://www.lynda.com/Accessibility-training-tutorials/1286-0.html

• Creating Accessible PDFs

• Acrobat DC: Creating Accessible PDFs

• PAVE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV74gxcwQ58

SiteImprove: https://siteimprove.com/blog/how-to-create-accessible-pdfs

PDF Webinars

• Adobe PDF Webinars

Outside vendors

• CommonLook (on VITA contract): https://commonlook.com/accessibility-software/commonlook-pdf-globalaccess/commonlook-pdf/

• Equidox: https://equidox.co/

Deque: https://www.deque.com/ (PDF remediation +)