Standard B3: Documents contain real text

Description

Handouts and other supplementary documents contain real text and are not scanned images. Some PDFs are scans of printed documents that are saved as PDF files; these files do not contain actual text and are merely images of text.

DEI Application

Scanned PDFs are not accessible to people who rely on assistive technology (such as screen readers) because the technology cannot read the text images. You usually cannot know whether a PDF has scanned text by simply looking at it. If you cannot select text in the PDF using a mouse, the document was scanned. You can use optical character recognition (OCR) software to convert the text image to readable text. This ensures that screen readers and other assistive technology can read out the words.

Example

Scanned reading PDF versus remastered reading with real text.