Making PDFs accessible
22nd June 2006 by Liam McGee
A recent post to the Guild of Accessible Web Designers’ email list asked about the best way to make an existing archive of PDF documents accessible. Here’s what we replied:
It’s likely that the pdfs were not constructed with accessibility in mind, so won’t be taking advantage of even the limited accessibility features of the PDF format. You could reconstruct each PDF to have some semantic information about headings etc., but it will almost certainly be faster and more effective (both from the point of view of accessibility and search engine friendliness) to convert the PDFs to accessible HTML.
First convert the PDF content to HTML via an automated online service such as Adobe’s PDF to HTML convertoer or some desktop software such as intraPDF.
Then convert the output HTML into valid, accessible HTML.
Hope this is of some help to anyone else with a similar problem.