Web Access Centre Blog

Across the world, millions of PDFs are generated every day. Organisations, businesses and governments use them, small companies and individuals use them - they are everywhere, but why?

Printing - paper is still very popular and PDFs print out reliably.
Protection - the information is locked.
Design - a company can implement its corporate branding guidelines and know that everyone seeing that document is getting the same experience.
Foolproof - its not complicated to create a PDF, just a couple of clicks and its done.

PDF’s should really be intended for reading in their printed format and not on screen. This becomes even more relevant for screen reader users.

As a screen reader user myself I’ve hit up against lots of problems trying to access and read information presented in PDFs. More often than not PDFs are much harder to navigate and read than other document formats and leave me confused or doubting the accuracy of what I’m hearing.

Help is at hand - we’ve produced Accessing PDF using JAWS: a users guide.

This guide is aimed at you the screen reader user, those people who support you and of course policy makers and IT managers. The guide is from a screen reader users’ perspective and sets out tips on reading PDFs, Adobe’s official guidelines, what’s inside a PDF, links to conversion resources and a section that somewhat bravely comments on the legal aspects.

Please use the guide and tell us what you think and share any tips you may have.

Together we can make PDFs what they were designed to be: a way of sharing information irrespective of location or platform.

Hugh