[Michlib-l] Accessible pdf of financial reports/budgets

[James B Lenze]

Colleagues,
Is anyone else struggling with the accessibility requirements for pdfs?
Where I am struggling most is with financial reports, budget documents, or
any document where the data is presented in tables.

Starting with QuickBooks, I create a "Budget vs Actual" report.  I export
the report as a pdf and open it in Adobe Acrobat Pro.  I run
Adobe's accessibility checker. It always finds two issues ("logical reading
order" and "color contrast" which need to be manually passed).  Sometimes
it finds additional errors, but they often have easy fixes.  Once I fix
everything, I save my work.

Alternatively, I start with Excel (through Office 365) and keep all the
formatting to a minimum.  No merged cells.  Every cell contains something.
No images, only text and numbers.  No empty rows.  After entering the data,
I run Excel's accessibility checker.  Everything passes.  So I save my work.

Then, I select "Create Adobe PDF" from the Acrobat ribbon in Excel.  The
pdf looks bland, but readable.  Then I run Adobe Acrobat
Pro's accessibility checker.  It finds the same two issues ("logical
reading order" and "color contrast" which need to be manually passed).
Again, it sometimes finds additional errors, but they often have easy
fixes.  Once I fix everything, I save my work.

Then I upload the pdfs to my website, which runs another accessibility
checker.  This checker finds lots of errors whether I started with
QuickBooks or Excel.  The more cells in my table, the more errors found.  I
find it extremely tedious and time consuming to research these errors and
apply fixes.

Has anyone found a simple workflow to create accessible pdfs with large
tables?
Or is my website host just trying to make a quick buck by finding "issues"
which don't exist/don't need to be fixed?  It says it is checking against
the "WCAG 2.1" standard.

Thanks,
    James


James B Lenze (he, him, his)
Library Director
Garden City Public Library
31735 Maplewood St
Garden City, MI 48135
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