Development and Evaluation of a Tool for Assisting Content Creators in Making PDF Files More Accessible

Abstract

Most PDF documents are inaccessible for people with disabilities, creating barriers in education, science, commerce, e-government, and recreation. Documents in PDF format are considered harder to make accessible than documents in other formats, primarily due to the insufficient tools available to assist content creators. In this article, we present the research and development of Ally, a new tool to assist content creators in remediating their PDF files to improve accessibility. Ally utilizes best practices from other areas of HCI research to create a more efficient and effective interaction for remediating regions, headers, reading order, and tables in a PDF document for improved accessibility. Twenty participants attempted to complete the same PDF accessibility remediation tasks using both Ally and a standard industry tool, Adobe Acrobat Pro. Ally was almost twice as fast and three times as accurate compared to Acrobat Pro, with participants reporting a strong preference for and a much higher level of satisfaction with Ally. The approaches taken in Ally improve the ability to create accessible PDFs efficiently and accurately for the four important aspects studied, but future work will need to incorporate additional functionality, related to remediating alt text, forms, and other aspects of PDF accessibility.