Why Is Testing Different Document Types a Key Concept for Accessibility?

In this book, we’ve talked about many different concepts to test for with regard to accessibility–things like headings, color contrasts, alt text, and meaningful hyperlink text.

A document (like a PDF or an EPUB) could potentially have issues with a number of these concepts, so it’s necessary for you to test these document types before bringing them into a Manifold project.

How Do I Test Different Document Types in a Manifold Project?

For your Manifold project, you will probably be bringing Word Documents and Google Docs into it, but you also might work with other document types like EPUBs and PDFs.

In making your Manifold book, you might create your own EPUBs, or you might find them on sites like Project Gutenberg and Standard EBooks.

But not all EPUBs are accessible. Similar to bad documents and webpages, they, too, can have inaccessible headings and absent alt text.

To test your EPUBs’ accessibility, a good tool to use is Ace by DAISY. If you upload your EPUB into it and run a test, it will let you know if it passes.

PDFs are notorious for being inaccessible.

The easiest accessibility test you can do on a PDF is to try to select a portion of text or all the text. You can’t do it? Then that means that your PDF is inaccessible to screen readers like VoiceOver, NVDA, and JAWS.

If you have access to Adobe Pro, UW IT has instructions for fixing your PDF for accessibility.

In Manifold, you cannot bring PDFs in as texts (as you can with Word documents and Google Docs) but you can ingest them as Resources. You never want to ingest a PDF that isn’t accessible.