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Illinois Digital Archives
Accessibility Guidelines

Photographic Materials (photographs, slides, negatives, transparencies, etc.) -- Audio or written descriptions

Graphic materials (Posters, art works, etc.) -- Audio or written descriptions

Audio Materials (audio tapes, oral histories, etc.) -- Transcripts

Video Materials (moving images with sound) -- Transcripts and Text Captions
Options:
Synchronized - text appears at the approximate time the audio is heard
Equivalent - caption content should be equivalent to the spoken word

Pertains to audio and video played through multimedia players (e.g. Quicktime, Real Player, Windows Media, Flash Shockwave or Java)

Text Materials (books, documents, pamphlets, newspapers, etc.) -- Transcripts (text files created by Optical Character Recognition software)

Manuscript Materials (diaries, letters, other hand-written documents) -- Transcripts

PDF Format Materials

All accessible PDF documents have the following five characteristics:

A logical structure and reading order
For screen readers to read a PDF document effectively, the document must have an underlying logical structure and reading order. This logical structure and reading order use behind-the-scenes elements called tags, which a PDF author adds to the document. Tags define the intended reading order of the content on each page. Screen readers rely on these tags to present text in a way that makes sense when someone is hearing the text read out loud. The tags allow a screen reader to interpret page elements such as headings, sidebars, tables, and multi-column text.

Alternate text descriptions for figures, form fields, and links
Authors of accessible PDF documents add descriptive alternate text to page elements that are typically presented not as text but only as visual elements, such as graphics, figures, form fields, and links. When screen readers encounter alternate text, they can interpret the element and read its alternate text description aloud.

Navigational aids
Similar to accessible Web pages, accessible PDF documents also include navigational aids, such as links, bookmarks, a table of contents, and an optimized tab order for forms and embedded links. These navigational aids enable a user to go directly to a particular point in a document, instead of reading it through page by page.

Security that doesn't interfere with assistive technology
When creating PDF documents, some authors add restrictions to prevent users from printing, copying, extracting, commenting, or editing text. These restrictions can interfere with a screen reader's ability to convert the on-screen text to speech. The content of an accessible PDF document is available to screen readers, regardless of the security restrictions in place.

Fonts that allow characters to be extracted to text
The fonts used in an accessible PDF document contain enough information for Adobe Reader to correctly extract all of the characters to text for purposes other than displaying text on the screen. For example, Adobe Reader extracts characters to text any time you listen to text by using a screen reader; print; copy and paste; or save text to a file.

If the font's underlying information is sufficient, Adobe Reader can extract each character correctly each time you perform one of these tasks. If the information is insufficient, Adobe Reader cannot substitute characters correctly, and the output will be incomplete. For instance, the screen reader may omit words or characters, or you may see question marks, black rectangles, or similar marks when you print, copy and paste, or save a PDF document as text. If a PDF document contains one or more fonts that do not contain enough information for Adobe Reader to correctly extract all characters to text, the document is considered inaccessible.

Exemptions from Accessibility Requirements:

-- Maps
-- Aerial photographs
-- Musical scores (score only - lyrics must be transcribed)