Criteria

Avoid

• PDF is an image-only file such as a scan.

Exception for handwritten texts. In such cases, include a transcription of the handwritten text as a separate file.

Required

• PDF includes tags with appropriate headings, paragraphs, lists, etc.
• PDF includes key document properties. (title, language and show document title in tab)
• PDF includes bookmarks (PDFs with greater than 20 pages).
• All tables contain table header tags 
• PDF is reviewed for proper reading order.

Bookmarks can be used by assistive technologies to navigate the document so application of TOC tags is not a critical feature. Note that artifacting out table of contents will not affect the interactive nature of the table of contents generated by born-digital PDFs. Bookmarks can be generated from document structure, so reviewing structure before creating bookmarks can save you time in remediation effort. 

• Artifact out repeating headers or footers.
• Linked note tags.

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If the PDF is scanned from printed material, the tagging of notes and table of contents is likely to be labor intensive and beyond the resources of staff to manually enhance. Tag at discretion of reviewer.  

• Set image alt text to null.

This assume any image found in the document either contains captions, described within the body of the text surrounding image or is purely decorative. Alt text is not required if these conditions are met but all images still should be marked appropriately (i.e. empty quotes).

• Ignore color warnings.

To follow archival standards to render a “faithful reproduction” of the source document do not change appearance of texts, images or color as originally created by the author.