You’ve followed the guidance for accessibility tagging in Workiva, and exported your PDF...now what?

Preparing a file in Workiva for accessibility allows you to set accessibility on many levels, however, manual review and intervention is often required. There are multiple factors that go into accessibility, and while Workiva strives to automate as much as possible, there are manual steps that should be taken to prepare a final accessible PDF. 

After following the guidance in Make your PDFs more accessible, tools outside Workiva should be used for accessibility checks and remediation.

The WCAG standards should be reviewed and followed; with additional steps taken once the file has been exported. 

Many areas of Workiva are set to support accessibility and should be used where possible. A few examples of this are:

• Table of Contents: The Automated Table of Contents feature should be used over a manual table of contents. The automated table of contents will use the item structure tags, whereas a manually created table will be tagged as a general table.
• Lists: Numbered and bulleted lists should be used over symbols, as this will apply a list tag
• Footnotes: The footnote feature should be used instead of creating a manual footnote (e.g. in a table) for the tagging to recognize a number as a footnote

Style mapping, lists, tables and alternative text can be set in Workiva to support accessibility. However, reviewing read order and contrast are two main areas that may require remediation outside Workiva. Additional areas for review are charts and background images/headers that may have material information. 

We’ll break these areas down a little:

Read Order

• Workiva sets read order from top left to bottom right. If multi-column is set, it will read top left to bottom right by column
• With highly designed pages using floating objects, this can sometimes be hard to systematically read

                                  ➤ This often requires remediation as design layouts may not always follow the natural path expected for a screen reader

                                  ➤ Design layouts may vary significantly, and Workiva’s best practices when setting up design layout should be followed when possible                                              (see Reporting for design professionals for details)

                                  ➤ A key area here is to use floating objects when appropriate, rather than using tables for design layout. When tables are used, the                                                 accessibility logic for tables is used

                                  ➤ Adjusting read order can be a time-consuming part of remediation and exporting throughout the process to see where remediation is                                            recommended

Images

• Background images, headers, and footers should not contain material information and will be tagged as artifacts
• If material information exists that should be tagged for accessibility, it’s best to add as part of the page body
• Images that are decorative, can be set as decorative to tag as an artifact and no longer require alternate text
• Alternate text can’t be applied to images inside of tables as table rules supersede the image

Tables

• Tables should be kept simple (see comments about tables in Read Order and Images) to allow accessibility to automatically tag tables correctly
• Table headers can be set to ensure the correct table header tags are applied
• Minimize blank or merged cells - this can be confusing to screen readers and features such as “space before/after” and row height can help make tables more readable

Headings

• Web accessibility standards define six levels of header hierarchy, the Style guide editor will only allow users to set up to six levels 
• If you have more than six levels of headers, headers beyond a sixth level could be set as a sixth level header, or changed to a paragraph style
• Nesting should be reviewed - maintaining the correct heading level throughout the document should be maintained, this will avoid confusion with accessibility checkers. (Correct order: H1 > H2 > H3, Incorrect order: H2 > H1 > H3)

Color Contrast

• This is not something that is checked in Workiva, but can be checked with accessibility checkers
• Using File Colors is a great way to set colors on a document for all to use. These colors can help maintain consistency throughout a document and support color contrast set to support accessibility
• For textual colors, these can be set in the Style Guide and locked for consistency