Making PDF Accessible and Section 508 Compliant

Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act as well as sim­i­lar state leg­is­la­tion require that elec­tron­ic doc­u­ments pro­duced by dif­fer­ent entities–both gov­ern­ment agen­cies and non-government entities–include addi­tion­al fea­tures to make those elec­tron­ic doc­u­ments equal­ly use­able by sight­ed and visually-impaired peo­ple and by hear­ing and deaf peo­ple. In some sec­tors, com­pli­ance is manda­to­ry under penal­ty of hefty fines. Even those enti­ties not cur­rent­ly required by Section 508 to pro­duce ful­ly acces­si­ble elec­tron­ic doc­u­ments in PDF doc­u­ments should vol­un­tar­i­ly com­ply to ensure that their doc­u­ments are use­able by the more than 10 mil­lion hearing-impaired and 25 mil­lion blind Americans.

Making a PDF acces­si­ble is a respon­si­bil­i­ty already placed on both inter­nal and exter­nal pub­li­ca­tions, and it is incum­bent upon every busi­ness per­son, mar­keter, and dis­trib­u­tor to ensure ful­ly acces­si­ble PDFs in com­pli­ance with Section 508 of the Americans with Disabilities Act.

This course will:

  • Explain the require­ments of Section 508 rel­e­vant to the pro­duc­tion of PDF documents.
  • Demonstrate tech­niques for auto­mat­ic and man­u­al doc­u­ment acces­si­bil­i­ty auditing.
  • Walk through step-by-step how to com­ply to the abil­i­ties of cur­rent technology
  • Teach how to build inclu­sive PDFs that ensure no per­son with a visu­al or hear­ing impair­ment feels like he or she is miss­ing some­thing in your documents.

This course uses Adobe Acrobat Professional and assumes stu­dents have a basic knowl­edge of work­ing with and cre­at­ing PDFs from with­in Adobe Acrobat X, Adobe Acrobat XI, and/or Adobe Acrobat DC.