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Creating Accessible PDFs: A Guide for Staff: Home

Ensuring that our university's documents are accessible to all is essential. This page provides resources to help you create accessible PDFs. Discover best practices, troubleshoot common issues, and learn how to make your documents inclusive for everyone.

Advice from the UON Digital Development Team:

A lot of UON documents are legacy documents, created years ago before accessibility requirements. These are usually much harder to fix, because of the way they were setup. We always advise creating any documents with issues from scratch, this way you can use the Office or existing accessibility checker as you make the document. Then, going forward, updates each term/year will be easier as the document is already accessible.

  • The simpler the document, the better.
  • Avoid tables. Or if you have to use tables, don’t merge any cells. These are common issues we have. Again point 1: the simpler the better.
  • Don’t just make documents accessible for website upload/public view. Even internal documents should be accessible.
  • Accessibility isn’t just about additional needs. We require documents to be less than 5MB for UON website upload too.

How to edit PDFs for general accessibility reasons:

How to fix specific errors when checking the accessibility of a PDF:

Further queries:

If you have any further problems or have any queries about PDF accessibility, please contact us via sdbookings@northampton.ac.uk

Please also see:

General Development