PDF files on the web are sometimes annoying and very often unnecessary. But when they aren’t either of those things, we need to make them accessible for the same reasons we make other web content accessible.
Contrary to popular opinion – and also contrary to quasi-judicial claims in some places – PDF documents can be no less accessible than HTML. While this may be a shocking revelation, it is nonetheless true. This article will explain how PDF does and does not support accessibility.
Seriously. Most of the time, Google does a half-decent job of making a PDF readable in HTML. Poor character encoding, ill-constructed multicolumn PDFs, and document security features can prevent Google from indexing a PDF at all, or doing so readably. Nonetheless, that’s what I do first.
There are too many PDFs on the web. Most every PDF should be something other than PDF. Any simple text-and-graphics document that is typeset in a single column should be provided as an ordinary HTML+CSS+JavaScript web page. Really, I can’t think of any exceptions for simple documents.
There aren’t many categories of online document that really should be PDFs and nothing else. And the list has decreased by one in the last year, since presentation slides can now be adequately handled by Eric Meyer’s S5 method. (Hence I have no excuse anymore for publishing my own presentation slides in PDF, so I’m going to stop.)