Open data, design, & development at the U.S. Department of the Interior
Ensuring accessible content beyond the auto checks: making a diagram screen reader friendly
March 29, 2022
While doing some work on onrr.gov I, Shannon, noticed that the organization chart was over a year old and still included people who had retired. I reached out to the document owner, Christina, to get an updated version.
Christina updated the chart source document with the new names and then converted it to a PDF. When she checked the PDF for accessibility errors, there were over 300 nested alternative text errors. They were corrected in the PDF on the old version, but not in the source document. This is why it’s important to correct errors in the source document.
Christina decided to fix the source document to ensure accessibility going forward. She added alt text, removed extra line spaces, and better formatted the phone numbers. She found that adding the alt text in the source document didn’t correct all the errors that resulted after converting it to a pdf. The process of converting generates new errors that must be remediated in the pdf, making pdfs more work to make accessible than source documents.
Image: Visio org [...]