How HTML Alternatives Improve Accessibility And Why PDFs Often Fall Short

SUMMARY
Organizations often default to PDFs to share important content, but PDFs create barriers for many users and are difficult to navigate, especially on mobile devices and with assistive technologies. HTML alternatives offer a more accessible, maintainable, AIO and SEO-friendly approach, and they are significantly more user-friendly. HTML pages allow users to search, scan, adjust text size, navigate with screen readers, and view content seamlessly across devices. This blog outlines a real-world example, their approach, and the impact, as well as key takeaways.

Table of Contents

• Why PDFs Create Accessibility and Usability Challenges
• A Real-World Example: Making Curriculum Maps Useful and Accessible
• How to Transform PDFs Into Accessible HTML Experiences
• The Impact
• Key Takeaways for Organizations

Why PDFs Create Accessibility and Usability Challenges

PDFs Often Lack Proper Structure

Most PDFs don’t include the semantic tagging (like headings, lists, alt text, and reading order) that screen readers require. Without structure, assistive technology like screen readers and braille displays can’t interpret the content accurately, making navigation frustrating or impossible for many users.

Fixed Layouts Don’t Adapt to Mobile

PDFs are designed for standard paper sizes. On phones or tablets, users must pinch, zoom, and scroll awkwardly to read content. For organizations with significant mobile traffic, this creates unnecessary friction.

Limited Search Visibility

Search engines have difficulty indexing the content inside PDFs consistently. This means much of the information in your PDFs may not be discoverable or may not rank well organically, reducing the reach of your content.

PDF Remediation Is Labor-Intensive and Hard to Maintain

Even when you remediate a PDF for accessibility, the work must be repeated every time the document changes. This creates an ongoing maintenance burden that is rarely scalable.

A Real-World Example: Making Curriculum Maps Useful and Accessible

When the University of Chicago Crown Family School set out to rebuild its website in Drupal 10, accessibility was a requirement from day one. As part of the project, we conducted one-on-one interviews with incoming and current students and learned what they needed most: clarity around degree planning, course sequencing, faculty information, field placements, calendars, and academic requirements.

Stakeholders agreed that the old PDF curriculum maps weren’t meeting those needs. Students found them hard to interpret, difficult to use on any device other than desktop, and disconnected from the rest of the web experience. To support both accessibility and usability, we helped replace the static PDFs with dynamic, mobile-responsive HTML curriculum maps.

How We Transformed PDFs Into Accessible HTML Experiences

Designing for Everyone

We rebuilt the curriculum maps using structured content fields, responsive layouts, and thoughtful visual hierarchy. This allowed the Crown Family School to maintain consistency, reduce ambiguity, and improve readability for all users.

Moving Beyond Color Reliance

The PDF versions of the maps depended heavily on color to communicate course types. To support and clarify the use of color, the HTML versions introduced additional cues like icons, text labels, and descriptive groupings to ensure clarity for users with low vision or color blindness.

Maintaining Print Needs With Modern Tools

One reason organizations stick with PDFs is that they print well. These particular curriculum maps were made at document size for a reason, after all. With the HTML versions, we solved that by implementing print-specific CSS styles, allowing clean, easy, and branded printing without sacrificing accessibility.

Iterative, Agile Collaboration

Through agile methodology, the project team iterated quickly, validated decisions with stakeholders, and ensured the final solution aligned with user needs and accessibility best practices.

The Impact

The new HTML curriculum maps dramatically improved accessibility and ease of use. They became:

• Fully responsive across devices
• Easier to maintain and update
• Searchable, AIO and SEO-friendly
• More accessible for users with assistive technology
• Clear and intuitive for prospective and current students

The site’s accessibility score increased significantly after launch. Although this was not solely caused by the HTML curriculum maps, they were certainly a big part of it. We were able to archive the PDF versions of the maps entirely, reducing the impact of having unnecessary PDF documents on the site and demonstrating the value of prioritizing accessible HTML experiences over static documents.

Key Takeaways for Organizations

If your website relies heavily on PDFs, consider these guiding questions:

• Which PDFs need to stay as documents, and which should be converted to HTML for better usability?
• How is your organization measuring progress toward accessibility goals?
• Are your most essential documents discoverable, responsive, and screen-reader compatible?
• Could HTML alternatives reduce your maintenance burden and give users a more seamless digital experience?

Accessibility isn’t a one-time project; it’s an ongoing practice. Moving from PDFs to accessible HTML solutions is one of the most impactful steps organizations can take to improve both user experience and digital accessibility.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you and your organization can break free from PDFs, reach out to us. We’d love to talk and help make the web more accessible to all.