Accessibility for Digital Documents
The best practice is to post content in webpages rather than as downloadable document files.
To ensure accessibility standards are met all documents posted to the website need to go through web support.
Before you start, ask yourself
- Is the content of the file current and accurate? Does it need to be removed when it is no longer current and accurate? Will it become outdated quickly?
- If so, it is better as a webpage that can be updated easily.
- Does its content need to be searchable on our site?
- If so, it is better off as a webpage. Search engines are more likely to produce relevant results for webpages rather than for PDFs.
- If this must remain in its document form, do I have access to the original file from which it was generated to correct for accessibility issues?
- If it cannot be corrected from the original source, we may not be to make it fully accessible and post it.
We do not permit links to cloud-based documents (OneDrive, Google Drive) or box storage. Although, these documents can be made accessible they can also be easily changed and cannot be constantly monitored by our team.
Siteimprove offers a list of all the internal and external documents linked from your pages.
This gives you a tool to quickly make a quick annual review of all documents. For external links, be sure to check the sources and see if a more current document exists.