Standards

UKAAF’s Clear and Large Print subject group oversees standards and addresses any issues relating to this format. In volume terms, clear and large print are probably the most commonly requested hard copy format in the UK.

Unlike some other subject areas, particularly braille, this subject area generally lacks any internationally recognised standards. It is therefore important, given the formats popularity, to try to ensure that the needs of vision impaired users are properly understood and addressed so that poor quality solutions such as enlarging originals on photocopiers are not used.

In addition to maintaining its clear and large print standards UKAAF therefore attempts to publicise and encourage their use.

Introduced by Adobe Systems in 1993, Portable Document Format (PDF) is widely used for publishing and reading digital documents and became an ISO standard in 2008. PDF/UA (Universal Accessibility) is a revision of the PDF standard that defines guidelines for making PDF documents accessible and became an ISO Standard in July 2012 (updated in 2014). PDF/UA is referenced by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.

PDF/UA includes several features in support of accessibility the core of which is the ability to determine the logical order of content in a PDF document, independently of the content’s appearance or layout, through tags. Hence the term tagged PDF. This makes it possible for an assistive technology like web browsers to read a PDF out loud, reflow it for a small screen and facilitate users who rely on the keyboard control.

PDF has the benefit that it can faithfully render printed material on a digital devices and on print media. PDF/UA ensures that documents are fully accessible when they use the guidelines, however, there are still many examples of bad PDF that fail to reach accessible standards.

UKAAF’s aim is to ensure that PDF/UA is adopted successfully in the UK market in industries such as publishing, government, healthcare, financial services and utilities.

To help make these documents accessible, UKAAF has drafted accessibility guidelines to assist users when creating them within Google and Microsoft office software.

Microsoft Office is a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft comprising of Word, Excel and PowerPoint with reportedly over 1 billion users worldwide.

G Suite is a set of cloud computing, productivity and collaboration tools, software and products developed by Google comprising of Docs, Sheets and Slides as well as a handful of other tools including GMail with reportedly over 4 million paying businesses and over 70 million education based users worldwide.

Many blind and partially sighted people choose to read material in audio form, even if they can read Braille or large print.

In addition to commercially available audio books, specialised material where structure is important, such as academic, scientific, cookery or any material where effective navigation of the text is needed, can be transcribed into audio using the DAISY standard.

The subject of accessible images is wide and diverse with many advances having been made during the last few years, not forgetting existing solutions. Tactile and large print Images, maps and diagrams are widely used within education, for plans of buildings and the external environment. The world of publishing, is also embracing provision and finding ways of incorporating this into workflows.

Our aim is to work and influence provision, direct people to where resources exist and connect with organisations in other countries making similar provision.

One area where we are working in partnership with RNIB is to provide additional information for the ‘Sign Design Guide’, now twenty years old.  An updated list of contacts with some new development will be included.

Formerly, UKAAF has not produced its own guidance on tactile graphics but contributed to the comprehensive document produced by BANA (The Braille authority of North America) which is available for free download from their website https://www.brailleauthority.org/guidelines-and-standards-tactile-graphics

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the most basic building block of the Web. It defines the meaning and structure of web content. Other technologies besides HTML are generally used to describe a web page’s appearance/presentation (CSS) or functionality/behaviour (JavaScript). Web content can be made accessible just by making sure the correct Hypertext Markup Language elements are used for the correct purpose. The HTML standard is developed and published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

WAI-ARIA is a specification written by the W3C, defining a set of additional HTML attributes that can be applied to elements to provide additional semantics and improve accessibility wherever it is lacking, for example for user interface controls that involve un-semantic HTML and dynamic Javascript.

EPUB is the standard for digital e-books and publications developed by the publishing industry. It is used around the world for education and leisure books, journals, and other publications. Of particular note is how reflowable EPUB adjusts the display to fit the available space, benefiting people with the small screens of mobile devices, and people reading with large text. The EPUB format is based on open standards that include W3C’s HTML. It benefits from extensive compatibility with assistive technologies, and an accessibility specification leveraging the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

Useful Links

EPUB accessibility specification
Accessible Publishing Knowledge Base
Accessibility Checker for EPUB (ACE)
Inclusive Publishing website

This section provides information we recognise to be of value to a wide range of people. It is used in many countries and situations with a wide range of names being adopted.

On this page, we provide details of our guidelines produced by UKAAF, RNIB, and CHANGE drawing together some other resources we hope will be of help.

Publications