Using PDF's in Courses

Preparing to teach a course is a lot of work, and sometimes you might have a book or article in your files that were scanned and saved as PDF's. Unfortunately, if not scanned properly, PDF's are very inaccessible, and create lots of challenges for all students to read and study effectively.

When you come across a scanned PDF, do your best to replace it with a proper accessible digital text document as described below. Scanned PDFs get a low accessibility score indicator in Canvas Ally.

At Rutgers, a great deal of time is spent remediating PDF files that have accessibility issues for disabled students. Most of this work can be avoided by choosing the appropriate accessible file format for course content. 

What Can I Do About PDF's in My Course?

Why Am I Using a PDF?

Before converting your PowerPoint/Word or other documents into a PDF, ask yourself why you are converting the file type into a PDF in the first place. 

Most instructors convert to PDF's because of security (i.e. you don't want students to copy and paste materials). 

Before scanning or saving a document as a PDF, consider making your PowerPoint/Word or other file format read-only instead and use an accessible version of the original document.

Below are some resources and suggestions for alternative accessible course content instead of using a PDF:

• Consider creating content natively in Canvas with the Rich Text Editor. Use the built in Accessibility Checker in Canvas and the Canvas Ally tool to check the content for accessibility. 
   
• Refer to this web site to make any Microsoft 365 app file format accessible.
   
• Refer to this site to make any Google document, presentation, sheet & video accessible. 

Managing PDF's for Course Content:

1. Remove any unused PDFs from your course by using TidyUp which is available free in Canvas at Rutgers.
2. For documents that you'd like to keep, but are for archival purposes only, you should move them to a folder clearly marked "Archived."  If the file is moved from archive to being used in a course, then it must be made usable and accessible.
3. Reformat your PDF. As mentioned above, if your document was originally a Word/PowerPoint/Google or other file type, we recommend uploading an accessible version instead of the PDF. You can upload read-only files to ensure the content remains the same and secure. 
4. Remediate the remainder. For those PDFs that genuinely need to be PDFs or the original cannot be found, we recommend you utilize tools like Sensus Access to provide text-based documents to your students or follow the resources below to convert your PDF into an accessible PDF. 

Ways to Make PDF's Accessible?

If you are unable to do the above and absolutely must use a PDF in your course or the original is unavailable, Adobe Acrobat has an OCR function, that allows you to digitize that PDF into a searchable PDF. In addition, Adobe's creating accessible PDF's page provides step-by-step instructions to create an accessible PDF document.