Portland State University

Executive summary

• 159

  PDFs found

  Linked from the pages this review reached

• 109

  Likely need a fix

  Checked PDFs that failed a basic check

• 15

  Possible exceptions

  Archived or older records for staff to review. Not a decision that an exception applies.

• 2

  Estimated effort

  Pages in high- and medium-priority PDFs that fail a basic check. Not a quote for hours of work.

Document list

The table lists 159 linked PDFs, highest priority first. 1 PDF is high or medium priority. Filter it to see what likely needs a fix or what may be an exception. A PDF ranks higher when it appears to be in use, when it is linked from the home page or from many pages, when it is recent, and when it is scanned or has no tags.

This page is the accessible inventory. The same rows, including the issue notes, are in the Rampfile CSV spreadsheet for Portland State University.

Sorting and filtering use JavaScript. Without it, the full list is still in the table, highest priority first.

Findings

Every linked PDF

• 109

  Checked

• 37

  Not checked

• 11

  Could not be read

• 2

  Excluded

These four figures sum to 159 linked PDFs. Checked PDFs are the ones this review opened and read. Not checked means the PDF was linked but not opened. Could not be read covers files that were too large, missing, or otherwise unreadable. Excluded links point to another organization.

Methodology

1. Pages reviewed

   Starting at the home page, the review followed public links on the same site and stopped at its limit of 150 pages. A PDF linked only from a page that was not reached is not included. Requests were at least one second apart. The review followed the site's instructions for automated visitors (robots.txt). No addresses were skipped because of robots.txt.

2. What each PDF was checked for

   Each checked PDF was tested for tags, which are the structure a screen reader can follow, for a text layer, for a document title, for a language, and for fillable form fields. Up to six pages, spread through the file, were sampled for text. A page counts as having text when it has at least 25 characters, ignoring spaces. A title does not count when it is missing, shorter than three characters, or only a file name, a placeholder such as "Untitled", or an automatic scanner ID.

3. Page counts

   Pages to address first are the pages in high- and medium-priority PDFs that failed a basic check. The total for checked PDFs that fail a basic check is a count of those pages. Both figures count PDFs that were checked. They are not estimates. Dates in the fix list use the best file date available: modified, then created, then the server's last-modified date.

   Estimate, not a count

   48 PDFs from this organization were not in the checked set (37 PDFs were not opened and 11 PDFs could not be read). Using the average number of failing pages per checked PDF, they would add about 96 pages that fail a basic check. That figure is an estimate. It was not measured.

4. How the fix list is ordered

   A PDF ranks higher when it appears to be in use, such as a form, application, or current notice, when it is linked from the home page or from many pages, when it was updated recently, and when it is scanned or has no tags. A PDF stored in an area labeled as an archive ranks lower. The spreadsheet includes every linked PDF, not only the rows in the fix list.

5. Out of scope

   This review does not include PDFs behind a login, Word or Excel files, or PDFs that are not linked from the pages reached. It does not test reading order, alternative text, table structure, color contrast, headings, or the labels on form fields. Those checks need a person, with assistive technology.