Accessible PDF project plans for all.

Making documents accessible to the public

Martin Rasmussen is officially known as a Project Manager at COWI, the global consultancy specializing in engineering and environmental solutions for public and private organizations worldwide. But he likes to call himself a translator. “I know a little bit about planning, website development, and data analytics,” he says. “I try to know just enough about everything so that I can translate what my expert colleagues do in a way that’s easier for clients to understand as they work in our digital planning tool, COWI PLAN.”

Major construction projects can impact many people, particularly when they are in urban areas. That’s why government regulations require that many of COWI’s clients share information about their projects with the public. As part of the digital planning tool group, Rasmussen oversees around 30 websites where clients share information about new spatial planning projects — including descriptions, maps, and data tables — with citizens and businesses.

Regulations also demand accessible content so that everyone can easily access information using screen readers or other reading devices. COWI follows accessibility best practices on its website and provides information as downloadable PDF documents, but the documents were not always fully accessible. Reading devices rely on tags to determine reading order and navigation or to properly describe visually complex formats such as data tables.

“We used PDF conversion apps alongside an open-source PDF server, but as new legislation made accessibility a higher priority, we needed to look at other options. Adobe Acrobat is the biggest name in PDF technology, so it made sense to start there,” says Rasmussen. “That’s when we discovered Adobe Acrobat Services. The PDF Accessibility Auto-Tag API was exactly what we needed to automate tagging and make PDFs more accessible to everyone.”

Converting thousands of pages with a few clicks

Typical planning websites include text, data, tables, illustrations, and dynamic elements such as interactive maps. COWI stores everything in COWI PLAN within Umbraco, an open-source content management system (CMS) that powers the website and feeds data into custom analytics. COWI developers use the Acrobat Services APIs to build seamless workflows that integrate with the CMS and turns each of these websites into downloadable and accessible PDFs.

“The documentation included with the Acrobat Services APIs makes it easy for developers to get started,” says Rasmussen. “There are guides and code examples that saved them hours of time so we could get the prototype running very quickly.”

First the Create PDF API converts each HTML page or visual asset into a PDF. Then the Combine PDF API pulls the individual PDFs into a single file. The final step uses the PDF Accessibility Auto-Tag API to correctly tag and identify the structure of the PDF with headings, paragraphs, lists, and tables to indicate the correct reading order for each document. Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s AI and machine learning framework, powers the API for greater speed and accuracy.

“We invested a lot of effort into making our website accessible and structured through templates,” says Rasmussen. “Consistent formatting, along with machine learning from Adobe, lets us tag with close to 100% accuracy. It would have taken us a lot of time to achieve the same results manually or with other solutions.”

A typical local plan has around 15 web pages that are converted into a 30-page PDF document. But bigger projects, such as municipality plans, may have closer to 2,000 PDF pages. The Adobe PDF workflow reliably creates and tags even the longest plans.

Planning for the future of documentation

According to Rasmussen, the end-to-end accessibility solutions in Adobe Document Cloud will enable COWI to add accessible PDFs to all its reporting workflows. Consultants already convert reports created in any app, including Word, InDesign, and Excel, before sharing them with colleagues and clients. They use Acrobat to make changes to PDFs without needing to re-convert original documents, and readers can take advantage of features such as Liquid Mode to read the reports on any device.

Using the APIs, COWI could build a new one-step PDF conversion to automate tagging for these documents to further improve accessibility. Adobe continues to add new APIs for additional functionality and accessibility, such as the new PDF Accessibility Checker API that evaluates accessibility and provides a report on 32 different metrics to streamline remediation.

“Reports aren’t as regular and templated as web pages, so we might need to manually remediate tags more often. Acrobat Services APIs eliminate most errors and take advantage of machine learning to become more accurate over time,” says Rasmussen. “I’m always looking at how future technologies and regulations will affect the way we work with digitalization and how that can affect our clients. We rely on Adobe to continue evolving with changing document and compliance requirements to make information accessible for all.”

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