Work > Writing > Instructional Content Sample

[NOTE: This is a technical writing sample created by Jeffery Oliver as an employee of the College of Arts and Sciences at Boise State. As such, links to resources have been intentionally removed.]

How to remediate most of your PDF’s in 30 minutes

This email is designed to help department chairs and web admins save a lot of time remediating many/most PDF’s documents on their websites.

  • SEND DATE: Wednesday, April 12, 2023

  • TO: Department Chairs, Admins and Web Admins

  • FROM: jefferyoliver@boisestate.edu

  • SUBJECT: Web Accessibility Initiative - How to remediate most of your PDF’s in 30 minutes

Email Body

Chairs and Web Admins,

You may have already received an email, or likely will this or next week, from OIT with an inventory of PDF accessibility issues to be addressed on your website. I have good news and an easy fix for most of the PDF files I’ve seen on the inventory documents.

Also, I’m working on some practical steps you can take to get your videos captioned and transcripted as well as some great examples for how to create accessible images and infographics.

I’ve noticed a trend in the PDF inventory docs that most departments will be able to resolve in about 30 minutes with this simple solution:

Internal- and student-facing documents should be moved to a Google Drive folder and then you can link to that folder from your website.

I’ve included instructions below on how I remediated 11 PDF files in about 30 minutes. Many of you will be able to do the same thing for internal- and student-facing documents like:

  • Student guidelines/handbooks for your department

  • Travel authorization forms (can these be made into web forms using Gravity Forms or a Google Form? That’s another option).

  • Course/degree map-type documents

  • Faculty-Advisor acceptance forms

  • Expense reports

  • etc.

You can see how we remediated the “College Policies” and “Honors and Awards” on the college website.

How to remediate most PDFs in about 30 minutes

  1. Sign in to your department Google Account by navigating to gmail.com and entering your department email account: department-account@boisestate.edu. You will be sent to the Boise State sign in. Enter your department email and password. (Alternatively, you can use a personal Google Drive folder but this method provides flexibility in case folks leave or move to another department).

  2. Click the Google App Launcher button (the Rubik’s cube) and open Google Drive.

  3. Create a folder titled something like “Website Content.”

  4. Within your “Website Content” folder, depending on how many files you’re presenting, you may want to create additional folders to organize for files.

    1. Be sure to name the files with clear titles like “Travel Authorization Form” or “[Department] Student Handbook.”

    2. We recommend separate folders for internal and student documents so these are easy for people to locate.

  5. For faculty and staff only folders, set the sharing permissions to “Boise State University” and “viewer.” For students forms, you’ll need to set these permissions to “Anyone with the link can view.”

  6. Drag the most current versions of your internal- and student-facing files into these folders.

  7. On your website, instead of linking to each form, simply add a link to the Google Drive folder.

  8. Very important final step: now you can go through your media folder in Wordpress and delete all the PDF files! You can filter by type “Documents” to help see all the PDF, doc, Powerpoint, etc. files. You can backup your files before deleting them from Wordpress by navigating to your media library and then:

    1. Click to view the document you want to delete;

    2. Then right+click (Windows) or <control>+click (Mac) the “View attachment page” link and select “Save link as…” or “Download linked file as…” to save the document to your computer;

    3. Then you can click “Delete permanently.”

What about public-facing PDF files?

If you have files that are public facing, you can remediate these by building the content of the PDF as a web page on your site. You can then include a link that reads something like, “Download a printable PDF version of this content.”

Another approach is add a link that indicates something like, “PDF available upon request.”

Web accessibility initiative resources

Here are some resources about this current initiative as well as practical steps for remediating common accessibility issues.

  • Federal Voluntary Resolution Agreement Regarding Digital Accessibility - This notice was posted to the Web Guide website and sent to web administrators on Nov. 30, 2022.

  • Web Content Accessibility Checklists on the Boise State Web Guide - These checklists are great for quick reference on how to best develop content on our sites considering structure, text, images, tables, graphs, links, video, audio, PDFs and more.

  • Our Responsibilities as Website Owners at Boise State - This page describes our various roles toward maintaining websites that provide the best experience for all people.

  • Review Published PDFs in Monsido at Boise State - This document describes how to use our web accessibility tool Monsido to find PDFs.

  • Accessible Infographics via Boise State Web Guide - This page describes the best ways to make content in infographics accessible to everyone.

Thanks so much for your time,

Jeff O.