It's important we produce content on our website that is available to everybody, regardless of device or accessibility needs, and doesn't exclude people based on format or display.
The key point we'd like to make is that web pages are the most accessible way of sharing information. PDFs, slides and other formats are less accessible and may make it harder for people to read and engage with your content.
Why are web pages better?
Assistive technology
There is a wide variety of assistive technologies such as screen readers, magnifiers and literacy software. Separate to this, some users need to change browser settings such as colours and text size to make web content easier to read. Some users may also use specific devices designed for this purpose.
On a web page, behind the scenes, information is structured in ways that this assistive technology can understand and translate for the reader. e.g. our headings, page structure items and menus are actually coded so that even if you can't use them visually, you can navigate them with keyboard or voice.
It’s difficult to do this for content in PDFs, for example - you can magnify the file, but the words might not wrap and the font might pixelate, making for a poor user experience. Locking content into a PDF limits the ability for people to make the kind of accessibility customisations they might need to read the content.
Mobile and other devices
More than 50% of our audience uses mobile devices to visit our web page.
Web pages are built to be responsive and flexible to different screen sizes. PDFs, slides and other tools are not designed to be flexible in their layout. They generally require a lot of zooming in and out, and scrolling both vertically and horizontally.
Making people open PDFs also means going away from the website, and often takes people out of their mobile browser. This makes navigation around related content harder and the overall experience more frustrating.
PDFs are also often larger in file size, making it slower to access on a mobile.
Less up to date
PDFs tend to stagnate, as people can lose access to the original file and therefore struggle to update it if things change. Web pages can be kept up to date more easily.
Structuring your pages
Key things to do when creating a web page to allow assistive technology to read
- Use headers - this helps assistive technology show the viewer e.g. a table of contents on a page without scrolling or reading.
- Don't use header styles on things that aren't headers - e.g. to draw focus to a text, consider a blockquote or just bold text. Otherwise, that lovely paragraph you want to be the centre of attention becomes a giant table of contents item for the accessibility software.
- Label images - Make sure you provide meaningful image summaries ("alt" text) so people know what images depict.
- Don't have the image contain a lot of text - e.g. don't have a paragraph of text within an image, try to have it be text on the page e.g. with the image beside or behind. Make sure if there is text in the image, it isn't critical information for the page.
Being accessible with other formats
Sometimes for publication a PDF is the "final form" of the document. If you've got time, we'd always recommend producing a website version of this page (using "Landing Page / Report"). However if that's not possible, see below.
Microsoft tools all have an "Accessibility Checker" built in - see Accessibility Checker.
UCL has an Office 365 accessibility portal, with some guides for making sure you are as accessible as possible with other document formats:
More reading
UCL has a Digital Accessibility Services portal for you to explore.
The Government Digital Service recommends creating web pages rather than producing documents in PDF or other formats - see their advice here.
FAQs
What about accessibility issues on our website?
We're certainly not perfectly accessible yet! Please encourage anyone who has experienced an accessibility issue on our website to report it to [email protected] as soon as possible and we will prioritise a fix.
Why don't we have an accessibility overlay on our website?
Tools like Recite Me have made an appearance on some websites recently. However, a lot of accessibility experts are opposed to these for several reasons outlined in the Overlay Fact Sheet.
Our focus at the Union is making sure our website itself is as accessible as possible using modern standards and tools, rather than adding a layer over it to make it work instead. For example, we've taken the time to ensure the hidden structure of pages is compatible with accessibility tools, worked out what colour combinations meet accessibility requirements, and even spent a long time working out exactly how far away and how bold the line under our links should be to be as readable as possible.
Knowledge base
Category
- Content editing