Skip to content Skip to navigation

APPENDIX D - Additional Notes on Documents Accessibility

Documents also provides some additional functionality that has direct impacts on accessibility, like publishing to a Web page, creating PDF files and creating document templates.

Publishing to a Web page

Publishing a document as a Web page introduces numerous accessibility errors:

  • The Web page has no doctype.
  • The language of the page is not defined, even when the value is set within the document itself.
  • Images do not have any alt text or even an alt attribute.
  • Tables do not have necessary headers, captions or summaries.
  • Unordered lists <ul> are stored as ordered lists <ol>, substituting bullets for numbers.
  • Lists more than one-level deep output deeper nested parts of the list as entirely new lists instead of nested lists. CSS and the start attribute are used to give the illusion that it is one continuous list.
  • CSS is used instead of semantic markup for common HTML tags such as:
    • bold
    • italics
    • superscript
    • subscript
  • Equations are presented as images with no alternative text.

Creating PDF files

PDF files created within Documents are untagged documents. Tags are critical to making PDF files accessible. Without tags, Adobe Acrobat has to make best guess attempts at tags, which are not always accurate.

Creating document templates

Document templates are a starting point for new documents that contain pre-populated content. Templates cannot be edited by users, but rather are copied into a new document for further editing. Document templates neither add nor remove any accessibility features beyond what a standard Document already has.