PDFs, posters and flyers

A cartoon character lies on the floor looking at a web page drawn like a map, with a route marked across it

PDFs are good for one thing, printing. Everything else about them is a problem on the web. They are small on a phone and need zooming and sideways scrolling. A scanned PDF is a photograph, so a screen reader gets nothing from it. Google indexes them badly. Nobody updates them, so the one on your site is 2 years out of date. And people have to download something before they find out whether it was what they wanted.

SEND websites are full of them. Letters from the council, scanned. Flyers for groups. Referral forms to print, fill in by hand and post. Easy Read guides, as PDFs, which rather misses the point.

Web page first, PDF second

The rule is that the information lives on a web page. A PDF can sit beside it as "download to print", but it is never the only copy.

  • Type the content of the document onto a page, with headings. For most letters and flyers that is 10 minutes.
  • If you must offer the PDF too, say what it is and how big in the link text: "Saturday club referral form (PDF, 2 pages, 200KB)".
  • Ask the council, or whoever sent you a scanned letter, for the original Word document or a link to the page it came from. There nearly always is one.
  • Turn paper forms into web forms. The next lesson covers them. Even a Google Form is better than print, fill in and post.
  • If you publish Easy Read, publish it as a web page as well, and link to it from the standard page.
  • Scanned letters. A scan is a picture of words, the same problem as the flyer in the images lesson.
  • A link that just says "Download".
  • A PDF made by printing a Word document to PDF. That throws away the headings. Use Save as or Export instead, with "document structure tags" ticked.

If you really must publish a PDF

Some things are PDFs because someone else made them that way, like a council's own guidance. If you make one yourself, make it in Word with real heading styles, give every image alt text, run Word's own accessibility checker from the Review tab, and export rather than print. GOV.UK has a plain guide, Publishing accessible documents (opens in a new tab), which also sets out what the regulations say about documents on public sector sites.

Posters and flyers

A flyer made in Canva is a picture, whether you export it as a JPG or a PDF. Post the words on the page as well, as in the images lesson. Once the words are on a page you can paste them into Dawn and see whether they read well, which a picture of a flyer never lets you do.

Check it

  1. Search Google for your site's PDFs. Type site:yoursite.org filetype:pdf into the search box with your own address. That is the list.
  2. For each one, ask 2 questions. Is there a web page with the same information? Could a parent read it on a phone at a bus stop?
  3. Open the worst one on your own phone and try.

Pick the PDF people need most, probably a referral form or a what we offer leaflet. Make it a web page this week. Leave the PDF up as a download beside it if people want to print.

In the guidelines: a PDF has to meet the same guidelines as a page, so 1.3.1 Info and relationships (opens in a new tab) (A) and 1.1.1 Non-text content (opens in a new tab) (A) apply to documents too. The Accessible Social Communications course has a short lesson on why PDFs are hard to make accessible.

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Discussion

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