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Case Study

Hurix Digital Delivers 29,000 Accessible PDF Across Education and Healthcare Sectors with WCAG 2.1 AA Compliance

Summary

Accessible PDF make it possible for users of adaptive technologies to access the content easily. This project was undertaken by Hurix Digital to develop WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508 compliant PDFs for the education and healthcare sectors. Part of this project involved enriching document structure, tagging content, and adding accessibility functionality to enable logical navigation and accessibility throughout.

The Challenge

Hurix Digital was tasked with taking unstructured standard accessible PDF and making them accessible to assistive technology users. Some of the major challenges included:
  • Running 25,000 education pages and 4,000 health insurance pages in a single cycle
  • Manually adjusting the content reading order, for logical navigation
  • Fixing tagging errors in tables, and nested lists, and adding alt text to images
  • Needed Spanish and French content compliance
  • Adhering to WCAG 2.1 AA and Section 508 guidelines and passing validation tests

Strategy

To overcome the challenges of accessible unstructured content and complex tagging, Hurix Digital approached accessibility compliance with a structured, detail-oriented methodology. Hurix Digital implemented a meticulous strategy to achieve compliance and accessibility:

1

Analysis and Verification

  • PDFs were analyzed in detail to tag the accessibility issues. Summarized checklist and the guidelines for standardization

2

Manual Adjustments

  • Adjusted reading orders by hand and corrected tagging errors in tables and nested lists to make navigation seamless

3

AI Integration

  • Used the EqualSense AI platform to make precise alt text for all images.

4

Validation Testing

  • Using tools such as CommonLook, Adobe Accessibility Check, and PAC3, all of our validated PDFs are completely compliant

5

Daily Updates

  • Daily progress updates and validator reports stayed nicely maintained, and communication with clients remained clear and transparent

Milestones

This culminated in strong results for Hurix Digital and demonstrated the benefits of a process-driven way of working with clients. The outcomes included:

  • Provided 29,000 fully accessible PDF, WCAG 2.1 AA compliant as well as Section 508
  • The content was standardized and had a structured format to inclusivity
  • Successfully resolved complex tagging errors so that adaptive technology users had a smooth usability experience
  • Rigorous validation tests were passed to make sure all documents passed the latest accessibility standards
  • Multilingual accessibility support for Spanish and French content was provided

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