Information about PDFs on the Website

In an effort to meet WCAG 2.2 compliance per state and federal rulings on Title II of the ADA, we can no longer upload PDF files to the website. The reason being is that PDFs are typically inaccessible content to those who are visually impaired and rely on screen readers to read content aloud. More often than not, these PDF documents are not properly tagged and do not offer this capability. Even PDF documents that have been properly tagged still suffer from the same pitfalls as all PDFs do, where they are hard to read and scale to different sizes.

Straight from policy M-24-08 of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), "Agencies should use Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) as the default when creating and publishing content online in lieu of publishing content in other electronic document formats that are designed for printing or preserving and protecting the content and layout of the document (e.g., PDF and DOCX formats). This process makes web content easier to find, use, and maintain, and makes it work more reliably with assistive technology." HTML is a webpage, in this scenario.

The solution to this problem is turning all PDF documents into webpages on the website, where possible. We are instructing content contributors to create a new webpage and transfer all critical content from the PDF onto the webpage, without copying and pasting. This is because HTML content, by nature, is much more accessible than PDF content. The webpage does not have to match the PDF exactly in terms of design and color. The most important part is that the content is on the webpage.

In the event where a PDF is far too large for a webpage, such as a 50-page PDF document, the best solution is to convert only critical content to a webpage.

Additionally, if your PDF document has fields for user input, it's best to convert the document to an MS Word file where the user can enter any information they want to, or switch to a service such as MS Forms / another surveying application for capturing user input.

For more information or assistance please email us at webchanges@farmingdale.edu. We will get back to your query as soon as we can, thank you for helping us make the Farmingdale State College website accessible for our users and community.