9.6.1 How to say it with PDFs

Until recently people with vision impairments could not access PDFs. This has now changed, so long as you have Adobe Acrobat Professional 8 or above, or use the built-in facility in Word 2007. The Scottish Accessible Information Forum’s publication ‘Making Information Accessible’, which you can download from the publications the website SAIF Scotland, offers clear guidance on how to create accessible PDFs. WebAIM (see previous paragraph) has more useful advice, as does the Adobe website. It’s good practice not to rely on PDFs as the only format for a document, though, as not all assistive technologies can access them. Always have a text-only version available, too, and text-to-speech wherever possible.