Do you create your PDFs by photocopying the source material? Do your PDFs have any handwritten notes on the pages?
If you answered yes to either of these questions, you should know that many students can’t read these PDFs at all.
- A photocopied PDF is just a picture of the page. It is 100% inaccessible for any student who uses text-to-speech tools to access course content.
- Handwritten notes in PDFs present challenges for ALL students, and are also unreadable for text-to-speech tools.
Before you spend hours at a photocopier scanning your course readings into PDF files: STOP!
Take your clean (i.e. no handwritten notes) source materials to Printshop Services and ask them to scan your course readings as OCR’d* PDFs. (OCR is a scanning process that extracts the text from the source material; PDFs scanned for OCR are readable for most students.)
For more information about accessible print materials, see:
*OCR = Optical Character Recognition.