Improve the accessibility of the electronic material you post on the web
As a Professor you can contribute substantially to an equal access to electronic information in PDF format to all your students.
Be aware that despite the progress made over the past few years, many PDF documents on the internet remain inaccessible. In addition, many PDF files are still being posted to the internet with little attention given to accessibility. In order for a PDF document to be accessible it must contain real text and be tagged and marked up for accessibility. Nonetheless, there are some items which at this time simply cannot be rendered in an accessible form within a PDF file. If your document features any of the following characteristics or items, you may wish to use MS Word or HTML to display the information:
1. Charts and graphs
2. Complex data tables
3. Greek symbols embedded in text
4. Mathematic or economic equations
How to request accessible PDFs from Librarians
In order to request accessible PDFs from Librarians you need to evaluate what information is already available to you.
1) Do you have an electronic version of the PDF you are requesting? If yes, you can send it to the librarians, so that, they can format the document and convert it in an accessible PDF.
2) Do you have a hard copy (good quality of print) of the document? If yes, you can provide that copy to be scanned and retrofitted using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. If the copy is skewed or is of poor quality this option will not work.
3) Do you have any way to get the original electronic document that you want to convert to PDF? If yes, then you can provide that document to the librarians so that, they can format the document and convert it to an accessible PDF.
4) If your answer yes to at least one of the three previous questions, you will be in a better position to request and to have accessible PDFs. If not, you can still request accessible PDFs from librarians and ask them to consult our site for more information about how to make PDFs accessible when no electronic version or hard copy (good quality) is available.