The Swedish public sector alone publishes every year millions of PDF documents.
PDF documents occupy a large proportion of the amount of information
on the authorities' websites for public digital service.
On September 23, 2020, all websites in the public sector across the EU
shall comply with the Web Accessibility Directive.
The directive also covers PDF documents published on these websites;
documents and presentation slides that must be published as accessible PDF.
Many authorities and other businesses are
chartered to focus on accessibility for everyone.
What is the situation right now for them when it comes to accessible PDF?
How well prepared are these core players when it comes to their own websites
and how they publish PDF documents and PDF presentations that must be
accessible for everyone?
NewFormat has examined hundreds of PDF documents, incl. presentation slides,
from more than 60 authorities; from the Government Offices to authorities with
special focus on accessibility for everyone and from external interest groups.
The results of the survey are very disappointing.
Not a single document, regardless of provide, is made as an accessible PDF!
Despite the fact that the directive has been binding for public entities since several years.
In their current design, none of them meet the ISO Standard 14289, PDF/UA,
for accessible PDF. They are thus not accessible for everyone,
nor are they accessible under the EU Web Accessibility Directive.
Great potential for improvements!
Contact NewFormat for more information:
Examples from public sector websites of important PDF documents/presentation slides
which unfortunately are not accessible for everyone
PDF documents can be easily tested/verified against how well they
comply with the ISO standard 14289, PDF/UA, for accessible PDF.
A reliable compliance test for the ISO Standard PDF/UA
always requires at least two stages of validation:
- a programmatic syntactic test, which can be performed by a piece of software, and
- an interactive semantic test, manually carried out by a human.
The PDF documents' syntactic conformity with PDF/UA
can be checked with several reliable testing tools:
For programmatic PDF/UA compliance validation of a PDF document,
we recommend to validate the document with more than one test tool.
If your PDF document does not pass the PDF/UA validation:
Contact NewFormat for advice on how to create accessible PDF