Before creating a document that will be required to be made Section 508 compliant, the production team should have a thorough understanding of what constitutes a Section 508 compliace and have reviewed the relevant guidelines or checklists provided by the acquiring Federal agency. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services provides comprehensive checklists for compliant documents that can generally be used for all government agencies. Not having an understanding of what is required for document compliance frequently leads authors and editors to create documents that cannot be made compliant without extensive and costly revisions.

General Guidelines

The primary defining characteristic of a compliant document is tagging. If the document cannot be tagged, it cannot be made Section 508 compliant. At this time, only Web pages and PDF documents can be tagged. Tags act as signposts to screen readers telling them how to advance through the document in a logical manner.

Certain documents that cannot be made Section 508 compliant such as Microsoft Excel files can be declared suitable for accessability accomodation. Quoting from U.S. Deparment of Health and Human Services Accomodation Guidelines, "An accommodation is a means or method outside of Section 508 standards designed to assist users with disabilities in cases where the application of current Section 508 standards is neither feasible nor helpful."

Text in the document should flow in an orderly fashion with proper use of heads, subheads, and body text. Elements such as sidebars, pull quotes, footnotes, and endnotes need careful consideration when planning where to place them in the flow of spoken text from a screen reader so as not to confuse the listener. Where the order in which text should be read is not obvious, such as on pages with many separate, unthreaded blocks of text, the author needs to provide a road map of text order to production personnel and editors.

Screen readers move in a linear fashion through the document. If you do not provide a method for jumping to a particular section, table, or figure, the user of a screen reader must read the whole document to find a particular item. Bookmarks can be used to allow a screen reader quick access to specific points in your document. As a general rule, any document 10 or more pages in length should contain book marks. Linked tables of contents and linked lists of tables and figures should also be used in long documents to provide easy access for persons using screen readers.

The author of a document should provide text descriptions of pictures, logos, and figures to the production staff. Section 508 requires that you must provide alternate text to describe graphic items that are important to understanding the meaning of your document. Screen readers do not understand data presented in graphic form. Alternate text is generally not considered sufficient to explain charts and graphs. These items should either be placed into a text form, generally by replacing the graphic with a table of the data that was used to create the graph, or immediately following the graphic with a table of the data points used to create the graphic.

Tables are frequently a significant stumbling block to creating Section 508 compliant documents. Table editing features available in Microsoft Word and Adobe InDesign should be used to create a table that will export as a correctly tagged table. The use of tabbed text to create a table will not export from an authoring program as a tagged table. The table cannot contain any merged cells, including spanning headers.

Producing a Section 508 compliant PDF document is a two step process: first is the production of the source file in an authoring program such as Microsoft Word or Adobe InDesign; and second, finishing the file in Adobe Acrobat Professional.

Authoring Programs

The most commonly used authoring programs are Microsoft Word (in conjunction with the Adobe Acrobat Plug-in for Microsoft Office) and Adobe InDesign. Adobe's PageMaker and FrameMaker programs can also used as authoring programs. What distiguishes these programs from other word processing and page layout programs is their ability to export pre-tagged text directly to Adobe Acrobat. Tags indicate the structural elements of a document such as headings, lists, tables, links, and form fields. Tagging also indicates the correct reading order. Without tags, screen readers such as JAWS are not able to understand the structure of the document and convey it to the listener.

Authoring programs can also be used to add meta data, alternate text, bookmarks, and url links. It is more efficient to add as many elements of a compliant file as possible in the authoring program rather than adding the elements in Adobe Acrobat.

Adobe Acrobat Professional

Adobe Acrobat Professional is used to complete and test the PDF exported from the authoring program. There are certain requirements that can only be completed in Acrobat, such as correcting complex reading order problems, correcting table structure in tag trees, updating the role map, and indicating the use of more than one language.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has extensive instructions on how to create accessible PDFs here.