Best practices for authors and editors for using binary resources in an accessible way
Make sure that binary resources, such as PDF documents or multimedia, are accessible to all users.
Transcription of audio and video
Provide full captions or transcripts of all multimedia: both a transcription of all audio, but also captions for all purely visual information in a video.
PDF documents
- Alternative formats
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Avoid having PDF documents as the sole source of information. Consider offering the content in the PDFs in one of the following formats as well or instead:
- If the information in the PDF can be converted to web content (HTML), offer it in that format.
- If the source for the PDF is a common format such as Microsoft Word or Microsoft PowerPoint, offer it in that format as well.
- Tags
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Ensure that PDFs you publish are tagged:
- Ensure that the document source of the PDF produces such tags.
- If that's not possible, use the Adobe Acrobat repair function to add tags.
- Further reading
- For more information about the use of PDFs, refer to the PDF Techniques for WCAG 2.0 on the W3C website.
Word documents
- Use Word files in the .docx format.
- Use headings 1 through 6 to structure your document.
- Create alt text for images by right-clicking the image in the document and selecting Alt Text.
- Check accessibility of the Word document by selecting .
Links to binary resources
Links to binary downloadable resources must specify the file type in brackets at the end of the link text. For example, use "MyProduct Release Notes (PDF)" as the link text for a link pointing to a PDF document called "MyProduct Release Notes."
Scanned documents
If you scan your document to produce a document such as a PDF, use Optical Character Recognition software, or OCR software for short, so that the scan produces searchable rather than unsearchable images.