PDFs may look polished, but they’re one of the hardest formats to make fully accessible. They often lack proper tags, don’t reflow on mobile, and create barriers for students using screen readers. Rather than repeating what others have explained so well, we encourage you to read Jackie Watson’s The Problem with PDFs: It’s an Accessibility Thing in College Daily (AACC) for an excellent overview of the history and challenges of PDFs in higher education. Here, we’ll focus on what to do instead — moving content into Word and especially into Canvas Pages, where accessibility is built and we have tools to guide us.
The Case Against PDFs
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