What I did

As Digital Production Manager for Online Grocery, my team and I champion digital accessibility, educating stakeholders on AODA and WCAG compliance. In 2023, I identified that third-party produced PDF brochures on our platforms were inaccessible, posing a challenge to influence external agencies for timely compliance.

How I did it

I collaborated closely with the Digital Accessibility lead at Loblaw Digital to structure an approach where by we could be educating both the third party agency as well as our internal partners on what actions needed to be take to ensure present and future PDF brochures were Digital Accessibility compliant.
This involved creating an easy to how to guide that presented all of the crucial reading and learning materials needed for the various partners we were working with to achieve all out compliance.

Key resources for achieving this included:

• Contrast Tools: contrast-ratio.com and brandwood.com/a11y/ are used for color and text-on-image contrast checks.

• WCAG Conformance: Information on WCAG A and AA conformance is available from Level Access.

• Accessible PDF Creation:

• YouTube tutorials and Adobe documentation guide users on creating accessible PDFs from Adobe Acrobat Pro DC and InDesign CC.

• The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) provides specific PDF techniques for WCAG 2.0.

• Testing & Remediation: Resources from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services and Adobe Acrobat User Guide assist with tagging and verifying PDF accessibility.

Most notably we were also able to strongly recommended the teams to consider accessibility during the design phase in InDesign to create accessible PDFs from the start, as remediating issues after a PDF is created is significantly more time-consuming.

Results

Through strong partnership and stakeholder management, we successfully implemented a sustainable process enabling rapid generation of fully accessible PDFs. This initiative reduced accessibility adjustment toil by 60%, cutting PDF production time from approximately 20 to 6 hours, and has resulted in over 8 digitally accessible PDFs being produced.