Today, we are going to learn all
about how to make links accessible in a PDF. Welcome to
the Accessibility Guy channel. My name is Shawn Jordison, I
wanted to start off with a document in Microsoft Word that
I have included several links, and one of which spans two
lines. The first thing I want to do is make sure I save my file
out correctly. So I'm going to select the Acrobat tab, and then
select Create PDF. Now from here, we can jump right into the
tags panel and begin to walk our tags tree. And we already have a
link tag followed by our link object reference. And then the
actual text of the tag. This is a properly formatted link. This
structure is very important. A link cannot be a parent tag, it
can only be a child tag to its parent p tag or other types of
structure elements like a table, every link needs to have some
sort of text. And that's where the span tag
comes in. I'm thinking the span tag is specifically in there
because we have blue fonts and it is underlined. And then
finally, we have what's called the link object reference. This
tells the computer that the link is clickable. And that it is in
fact a link. Let's go down to our link that has two lines in
its and as it stands now it has two link obj ours so it has two
separate object references, I actually want to see what this
looks like using JAWS. So I'm going to launch that really,
after I launch Jaws, I can do a shortcuts, insert f7 Links list
dialog, to pull up a list of links to just review. So I can
down arrow through these and listen to them. But what I want
to get down to is the list of links on the bottom of my a one to one World Wide Web
Consortium left pair A W three C right pair and web accessibility
initiative with some extra text to make sure that the link goes
onto line eight of 11. So this is actually telling me that the
link is properly formatted. Let's close out of JAWS for now.
And let's go ahead and run the accessibility checker just to
see interesting that we have some character encoding. But I'm
more interested in the links specific. Now what if we wanted
to add some links to this document, let's run through
that. The first thing I'm going to do is let's take this phrase,
what is digital accessibility, I'm going to right click it and
select Create Link. And we're going to have it open a web
page. And we're just going to type a web page and select
Enter. Now let's go ahead and run the accessibility checker
again. And when we did this method, it automatically added
our object reference, and it properly formatted the link. So
the only thing we would need to do in this example, is give it a
different color and possibly underline. And then let's see if
that messed anything up. Let's reload the checker. Alright,
it's looking pretty good. Sometimes there can be trouble
when you have links that go on to two lines. And the fastest
method is to really just delete the link off of both of the
lines and come back through and select all of the texts at once.
Right click, select Create Link and basically do it from the
top. And that will help with maintain the accessibility of
the link. Alright, sometimes when you have a link that spans
two lines, you're going to have two different link object
references. And really, we only want one of these. So I'm going
to delete it out of my tag structure. Then let's run the
accessibility checker and see what kind of problems we run
into. So it's telling me that I have a tagged annotation failed.
And basically what's happening is it separating the line into
two separate objects. And really the fastest method to fix this
is by deleting the links completely, and then read
tagging the entire thing at once. So I'm going to select all
of this text, right click it, select Create Link. And then I'm
going to type in the destination and select OK. This now makes it
have a single link object reference with all of our text
in one spot. It is now more accessible. Some other things
that you may consider applying for the accessibility of your
hyperlinks are things like alternate text. So if I take the
same link where we have the W three C Web Accessibility
Initiative, I'm going to right click my link tag select
properties. And we can actually add some alternate text in here.
I I'm going to say this is W three C Web Accessibility
Initiative and select Close. This provides additional context
to the link. And it is a requirement for some of our
other accessibility standards. So make sure that you're adding
alternate text to all of your links. You can also add things
like opens in a web browser or something like that. Now you may
find that there are still some issues with your links. The
purpose of this video was to just give you an overview of
what a link is supposed to look like within a PDF. There are
some advanced techniques using the Find functionality or the
Create tag functionality within Adobe Acrobat. I hope you
enjoyed this video. And as always, I can be your personal
accessibility expert. If you're finding that you would rather
not do all of this work to make your documents accessible. It is
a service that I offer, please check out the link in the
description of this video to find out more information. And
if you'd like for me to make a video on something else. Please
put a comments on this video of what type of content you would
like to see
