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To answer the question outlined above, “Yes, the PDFs on your website need to be ADA compliant.” Going over how you can make your PDFs ADA-compliant and speaking with a New York ADA attorney at The Samuel Law Firm will help you protect your website.

The exact rules regarding ADA web accessibility are complex and, occasionally, unclear. But, even though this happens to be the case, there are four basic pillars of web accessibility. And these four pillars are as follows:

-Perceivability.
-Understandability.
-Operability.
-Robustness.

If your website is perceivable, understandable, operable, and robust, then it is ADA-accessible.

But, if it isn’t one of those things, then it may not be ADA accessible, and you may be at risk of an ADA web accessibility lawsuit.

Many websites share PDFs on their web pages. Other websites rely on PDFs to convey key information that they happen to be centered on.

Just as an example, some legal websites convey elaborate legal concepts and the legal codes that they apply to through long PDF documents that wouldn’t work as standard web pages.

Even though the PDF documents on a website are not, technically, the website itself, they are still affiliated with the website and what it offers. This means that they, too, must be ADA-accessible.

If a particular PDF on a website isn’t ADA accessible, then it is possible that an ADA web accessibility lawsuit could be filed against that website.

No, this may not be likely, but if the information within a PDF is especially important to the website and what it offers, then it is definitely a possibility.

To make sure that the PDFs on your website are ADA accessible, there are a number of features you should include in every PDF document. And with that in mind, these features are as follows:

-Clear headings and subheadings that delineate each section.
-Easy-to-read fonts and font sizes that are equally easy to read.
-Alternative text that describes images, graphs, and charts.
-Descriptions for each hyperlink, including where they link to and the purpose of this link.
-An appropriate color contrast that makes the content easy to read.

If the PDFs on your website make use of these features, then they should be ADA-accessible. Even so, though, there is one more thing you must do before you can consider your PDFs ADA accessible: test them on multiple devices.

You must test your PDF documents on your desktop computer and the PDF reader that you use. But you must also test them out on other devices and other PDF readers.

If, on these other devices, your PDF is still accessible – and if the accessibility features these PDF readers offer are compatible with your PDF – then your PDFs should be considered ADA accessible.