Finnberry does Ed-Tech

We've been looking at WCAG 2.1 and how to ensure that your content meets these important guidelines. We haven't finished yet but I'd like to branch off on a little tangent and take a more detailed look at PDFs and accessibility. This is quite complicated compared to using Microsoft Office and it requires some specialist software. Most people are familiar with Adobe Acrobat - the PDF reader. For accessibility work, you really need the Pro version of Acrobat. It comes as part of Adobe Creative Cloud or you can buy a single product licence.  Accessibility Tools Accessibility tools are not turned on by default, so you'll need to go into your tools tab, scroll down and add Accessibility to your tools pane. This will give you an accessibility checker, which will analyse your PDF and identify any errors and warnings.  Errors usually include things like missing language, title, alt text and tags. Warnings are usually things that need manual checking, such as colour contrast. Vi...

 In my last post, I talked about the death of Flash, which pretty much dictated my workload this year. However another consistent theme has been accessibility. Accessibility is obviously a topic that is very close to my heart. I live every day with the challenges of inaccessible places and I don't just understand the frustrations, like an outsider watching in... They are very much my own frustrations. Although my frustrations are largely physical, they enable me to understand how it affects a disabled person when they cannot access something because it has been designed badly. Who is affected? There are many reasons why somebody might struggle to access online content. The most obvious is if they are blind or visually impaired, but think about all the different things you do online. You have to see it, hear it, understand it, read it, remember it, operate it, interact with it... and these can all be difficult, or even impossible for some people. In the same way as I use a wheelchai...