Forum Discussion
Rise PDF exports - Accessibility issues
(N.B. I edited this post on April 12 to clarify some comments and add additional information).
Hello community
I know about the many accessibility features of online Rise content (as well as which elements are not accessible - e.g., sorting), however my team provides a PDF of the Rise content for student use and we continually run into many accessibility issues for the PDFs. After creation of the PDF and use of the Accessibility Checker in Adobe Acrobat, many accessibility issues are flagged. The raw PDF export is not readable for a screen reader and it is a very complex and lengthy process to manually tag it to make it somewhat accessible. This process often results in new issues popping up when using the accessibility tools in Adobe to address the flagged issues. Often the issues cannot be addressed at all (e.g., the information box element is not legible) and workarounds must be employed . The alternative to manually tagging the file is to use the auto-tag feature in Adobe, which does not catch everything and manual intervention is needed after the fact as well.
This is not an Adobe problem. When creating a PDF export of a Word document, Adobe reads the PDF beautifully with little to no accessibility issues, with any normally caused by user omittance (e.g., forgotten alt text). The PDF exports for the Rise content are problematic with issues such as blocks of text being missed, some elements (especially interactive elements) being illegible, and more. It does not matter if you have created the content accessibly within Rise itself; the PDF export will be problematic no matter what.
I have worked with several team members on this issue, some who have been attempting to create accessible PDFs from the Rise content for longer than I have. We have also consulted with other departments using Rise. We all run into the same issues and have no answers. Other teams have opted to stop using the PDF export from Rise and go through a second process of creating a Word document of the Rise content for any student with accessibility needs.
We would love for Articulate to address the various accessibility issues of the Rise PDF export and provide a product that is fully accessible. Customizability of the export would be an added bonus so that things like awkward page breaks and unnecessary images can be modified or omitted.
THANK YOU, DANI! This has cost us an incredible amount of staff time and it seems like something that should be a reasonable ask for Articulate to fix, especially with new AODA Post-Secondary Education standards... WE NEED ACCESSIBLE FORMATS, Articulate!
Thanks in advance for making this a top priority so we can continue to use your products!
Thanks for raising this! I imagine this would be a straightforward task for Articulate to take on and would be a major value add!!
Thank you for bringing attention to this issue! Students need to be able to access their course content even without a stable internet connection: PDFs are a way to bridge that gap. This would be quite the selling point for Articulate!
I am going to add that, this is a major issue for all of your education customers. We need to be able to provide accessible content, it is an absolute legal requirement for us. I am currently trying to address an issue for a student with dyslexia. The student is unable to read the font in our rise product, their typical tools cannot be used with the SCORM file, and my next solution was to export the PDF. I am very unhappy to find that while I have taken the time to ensure that my headings are tagged appropriately, there is alt text, and I have met all of the accessibility requirements when building in Rise, none of these features are preserved in the PDF export.
Thank you! Especially with the new accessibility regulations coming from the Department of Justice this summer, we need support on this. We were already trying to be proactive, but the amount of work required is staggering for small teams with little time or support to both create and then manually edit the accessible versions.
