FormA11y—Research and Development of a Tool for Remediating PDF Forms for Accessibility

• Published in: ACM transactions on computer-human interaction Vol. 32; no. 1; pp. 1 - 39
• Main Authors: Paliwal, Sparsh, Hoeflich, Joshua, Jordan, J. Bern, Jain, Rajiv, Morariu, Vlad I., Siu, Alexa, Lazar, Jonathan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY ACM 19.04.2025
• Subjects: Accessibility systems and tools; Human-centered computing; User interface design; inclusive design; accessibility; blind users; PDF accessibility; born-accessible; document accessibility; PDF U/A
• DOI: 10.1145/3702317

PDF documents are usually not born-accessible, and so document authors need to put in additional work (remediation) to make them accessible for people with disabilities. Unfortunately, this step is often overlooked and hard to execute, resulting in a large number of inaccessible PDF documents on the internet. Previously, there have been research efforts to investigate potential solutions for remediating PDF documents for accessibility. However, most of the existing research focuses on accessibility of long or scientific PDF documents meant for passive reading. PDF documents come in different types, and this research project focuses on a distinct type of PDF document—forms—where the user is required to interact with the PDF document and enter data. Through our research work, we identified that the PDF form remediation process is non-intuitive, repetitive, and overwhelming due to the high-information density of PDF forms, and existing research and tools do not yet address the challenges. Our research work culminated in the creation of a tool—FormA11y—that addresses these challenges by making the repetitive and painstaking process of form remediation easier. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of FormA11y against the industry standard tool—Adobe Acrobat—for PDF form remediation, we performed a within-subject user study with 20 participants. With FormA11y, users remediated forms 2.8 times faster while creating more accurately accessible PDF forms.