Sorry, Norman, but you cannot claim full WCAG 2 AA conformance based on that tool. You can claim EPUB conformance, but that is nowhere near the same thing. Tools can only test a small fraction of the WCAG success criteria, and you can only claim conformance if you have done a full manual test. That is never going to change.
You are right that screen reader users are only one of the many user groups who need accessibility support. There are a couple of reasons why you hear so much about them and less about the others. Historically, the visual impairment community has been far more vocal than others regarding their accessibility needs, and they have an extremely well-funded campaigning organisation, the RNIB. Also, they are relatively easy to cater for because it is not too difficult to imagine what it is like to be blind or have low vision - in fact there are tools that simulate many of the conditions.
By contrast, the cognitive and motor impairment communities are far less coherent and don't have effective campaigning organisations, at least by comparison with the RNIB. Also, it is difficult for developers and content creators to imagine what it is like to be dyslexic, for example, so it is difficult to know how to create content dyslexic people will understand.
WCAG attempts to cover a broad range of accessibility needs, but it is acknowledged that it is still skewed towards supporting visually impaired people. If you learn what all the WCAG success criteria mean and how to meet them, then you will be well placed to create documents that are accessible to most people. However, there are 50 success criteria at level AA, so it takes a great deal of time to learn everything.
Steve
-----Original Message-----
From: Digital accessibility regulations for education <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Norman Gray
Sent: 03 December 2021 16:05
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Use of PDFs in teaching materials - Word accessibility checker limitations...
Steve and all, hello.
On 3 Dec 2021, at 14:56, Steve Green wrote:
> On a related note, I recently set out to verify if there was any correlation between the results from the Acrobat and PAC3 Checkers and a PDF's WCAG conformance. Of the 50 WCAG 2.1 AA success criteria, 11 do not apply to PDFs. Of the remaining 39:
>
> • Acrobat Checker can fully test 1 and partially test 5.
>
> • PAC3 Checker can fully test 2 and partially test 3.
>
> Even if we were generous and said they could fully test the 5 or 6 success criteria, you still couldn’t make any sort of claim about the WCAG conformance.
>
> I haven’t done the same test with Word’s accessibility checker, but many of the limitations are due to what an automated tool can do, so I would expect similar results.
On this particular point, I'll note that I ran a book-length EPUB, which originated in LaTeX, through both the W3C EPUB validator [1], which checks mostly technical conformance, and the 'Ace by DAISY' checker [2], which is concerned with accessibility. I got a clear result from both, which I think allows me to claim full WCAG 2 AA conformance for this artefact. In other words, this is definitely achievable (and I'm not a specialist).
That's EPUB rather than PDF, of course, and a rather custom workflow. Since the source document is LaTeX, sharing that source document isn't really useful (as has been rehearsed here already).
--> BUT I'm still not completely sure how useful this is in practice.
Various folk in this thread have mentioned screen readers, but I have built up the impression that, although users dependent on screen readers are a very important set of users here -- and they are highly sensitive to how well a document works with a screen reader -- that's not the complete set of users who might need accommodations here. I even get the impression that these users might even be a (very important) minority of the users needing accessibility support, and that if one focuses too much on screen readers, there are significant constituencies, with different impairments, who will remain under-served. Is that true, or have I got the wrong end of the stick?
And this is the root of my frustration (too strong a word?) with where I've got to here. I don't really understand the territory -- the range of actual problems which can be addressed by realistically achievable approaches -- so I'm not confident that what I've done is actually useful. Or perhaps simple and time-cheap things are actually much more useful than I expect, and my colleagues and I should stop worrying about it (simply hacking PDF tags into an output file seems to make our learning platform's accessibility scores jump up -- is that a false positive?).
This thread has included lots of very interesting and useful advice from many people, based on experience, heuristics, checkers, training, and so on, but it feels unstructured, to me. What appears to be missing is some fairly systematic description of the various constituencies here, and what is good, good enough, and not good enough, about various broad approaches. I've little idea where such a survey would come from (though I'd have thought that Jisc would have funded some sort of work in this area), but without it I, not a specialist but, as it were, an interested amateur, feel rather at sea.
Best wishes,
Norman
[1] https://github.com/w3c/epubcheck
[2] https://inclusivepublishing.org/toolbox/ace-by-daisy-app/
--
Norman Gray : https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK
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