5 Common PDF Accessibility Mistakes to Avoid for Your Business
Anyone who has used a computer in the last 20 years knows what a PDF is and how to use it. A PDF, which stands for Portable Document Format, is one of the most common ways for people and businesses to share information in a document format.
Although PDFs are easy to navigate, access to PDFs can prove to be difficult to others when they are created in certain ways. Here are some of the most common PDF accessibility mistakes that you should be aware of and avoid.
Common PDF Accessibility Mistakes
These might seem obvious, but they can be extremely easy to overlook, especially when it deals with deadlines. PDFs are supposed to be easily accessible, so avoiding these will make your business easier to manage.
1. Is Your PDF Keyboard Friendly?
Despite widespread mouse/cursor usage in the internet world, there are a few out there that do not use the cursor to access documents and apps on their computers.
Instead, they use their keyboards to access these apps and documents. Your PDF documents should therefore also be keyboard-friendly to accommodate these users as well.
2. No Structure to the PDF
One of the biggest issues with PDFs is the lack of structure and excess information. Using the header tool, you can create order to an otherwise chaotic document.
This can help to organize information for both the creator of the document and the reader, allowing them to navigate through the document with ease using the headers.
3. Not Utilizing Alt-Text
In many PDF documents, there may be pictures, graphs, and other multimedia that need to be explained. However, they might not be so important as to add it into the body of information. That is where Alt-Text comes in.
Alternative-Text gives brief synopses of the multimedia and has several benefits to make your PDF more accessible.
4. Inaccessible Links
Many PDFs will contain hyperlinks to videos or other external sources of information that are pertinent to the topic being discussed. However, these links can be mistyped or lead to a bad website that blocks access.
Make sure to check your URL once you have hyperlinked it in your document to make sure that it works.
5. Failing to Save Copies
Failing to save your document isn’t just for PDFs, but it is just as important. Sometimes when managing PDF files they can become corrupted, especially when many people have access to it.
So saving regularly and saving multiples in stages does mitigate this issue. this is imperative, especially when there are other PDF applications such as wkhtmltopdf c# that might not have the same amenities as the PDF application you might use.
Avoid These Mistakes in Your PDF
PDFs are used for many things including managing business document access. However, it can be easy to miss these common PDF accessibility mistakes.
Don’t make your business document sharing more difficult, be sure to correct these mistakes and avoid them in the future so that your business can run smoothly and effectively.
For other informative articles like this one on how to make your PDF more access-friendly, be sure to browse our blog site for more.
