General Guidance for PDFs and Documents
Social media, videos and other media are excellent ways to reach your audience on multiple platforms, with multiple points of view. But social media, videos and other media all come with accessibility requirements, as well as best practices.
The University of Maine System website is required to follow the WCAG 2.1 AA web accessibility standards (External Site) due to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) Resolution. Because of the OCR Resolution, a priority for the website is all content prioritizes accessible web content, which requires both consistency and accuracy.
Review media topics and best practices below.
Documents guidelines topics:
- Images
- PDFs
- Microsoft Word
- Google Docs (Coming Soon!)
Documents quick tips:
Images: Images should be decorative in nature only and not used to convey essential information. Images should have alt text and should follow color contrast ratios guidance.
PDFs: PDFs are among the most problematic areas regarding accessibility due to their abundance and prevalence throughout the University of Maine System website. PDF remediation is the responsibility of the content owner. PDFs can most readily be made accessible from a source document (a Word Doc), but can also be remediated using Adobe Acrobat. Most PDFs can and should be made into a simple web page instead of as an uploaded document.
Word: Microsoft Word documents are often more accessible than PDFs. It is recommended that if a document must be uploaded, it would be preferable to upload a Microsoft Word document (.doc).