Prepared by Sidney Gao and James Van Mil – June 2020

The Digital Collections Team is dedicated to ensuring that newly created digital collections are accessible to all users. This document addresses the accessibility standards by which PDFs in newly created collections will be held. These standards will not be applied to existing PDFs ingested to a UC Libraries repository.

This plan outlines a progressive approach for supporting the accessibility needs of PDFs stewarded by the Digital Collections Team. Further attention is needed to understand how to support the accessibility of born-digital collections, which is outside the scope of this document.

The PDF/UA Standard

The Digital Collections Team will abide by PDF Universal Accessibility (PDF/UA) standards for all newly created PDFs. The requirements for PDF/UA compliance are as follows:

  • Content is categorized as either meaningful content or artefacts.

  • Meaningful content must be tagged with appropriate semantic tags.

  • Tag structure must follow logical reading order.

  • Information may not be conveyed through visual means alone (e.g. font size or contrast).

  • No flickering, blinking, or flashing.

  • A document title must be given.

  • Document language must be noted.

  • Pictures must have alternative text (alt-text).

Please read the document linked above for more detail on the PDF/UA standard.

The Plan

The DCT will address basic PDF accessibility remediation according to PDF/UA standards within the digitization workflow, but labor-intensive remediation (such as transcription and providing alternative text) will be the responsibility of the selector or project manager.

Labor-intensive remediation planning will be required for all project proposals that contain manuscripts or visual-heavy documents (e.g. text that references a picture on the page). This remediation will be done during the final phase of creating a new digital collection through digitization. Due to the amount of time and attention necessary for this final phase, these accessibility remediation activities may be an on-going workflow that continues after initial collection ingest.

The following section specifies the PDF/UA remediation activities stewarded by the Digital Collections Team, and those stewarded by the selector or project manager.

Digital Collections Team

Within the course of the normal digitization workflow, the Digital Collections Team will:

  • Categorize all meaningful content as such

  • Tag all meaningful content with appropriate tags

  • Manually verify logical reading order

  • Specify document title

  • Specify main language

  • Set tab order that mirrors logical reading order

Selector/Owner

Within the final, on-going phase of digital collection creation, the selector or project manager will:

  • Provide transcriptions for manuscripts within the collection

  • Provide alternative text for PDFs that contain important visuals

The Digital Collections Team is available to aid in project planning for these labor-intensive accessibility remediation activities.