Hosted by the CTL in collaboration with USD Marketing and USD ITS, the PDF Extreme Makeover Event is offered at the beginning of every Spring and Fall semester for 3 weeks. The event provides expert training on PDF accessibility. It supports the University's goal that all staff and faculty are knowledgeable in creating and posting accessible PDFs for the USD public website and online courses so that published digital content meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 Level AA. Digital accessibility guidelines help people with disabilities to effectively access content in digital spaces without having to request accommodation.
Dates: April 7-April 22, 2025. Virtual and in-person weekly synchronous sessions at 3:00 pm CST each Monday (recorded). On the week of the 21st, the session will be held on Tuesday the 22nd. Tuesday through Friday, contact to get help over email to udl@usd.edu.
USD Overall Goal: PDFs posted on the USD website are at least 95% WCAG-compliant, and documents in D2L pass with a minimum 85% accessibility score with no serious errors. All documents that are critical to programming and services must meet WCAG 2.1 Level AA compliance and function with common screen reading software.
Sign up to participate by emailing udl@usd.edu.
Participants will:
1) collect and identify non-accessible documents and PDFs through testing
2) remediate non-accessible PDFs, and learn to create accessible PDFs from Microsoft Office and Google Docs.
3) apply solutions to non-accessible PDF forms
4) apply techniques to make accessible PDFs using Panorama for D2L, FoxIT-PDF Editor, and Adobe Acrobat Pro
5) understand how screen reading software works with PDFs
6) earn a certificate of achievement in PDF Accessibility upon demonstration of creating at least three compliant PDFs.
PDF Tracking Spreadsheet
USD Accessibility on Coyote One Stop
Creating an accessible PDF from a scanned document video (4min) for faculty by Mandie Weinandt
Creating Accessible PDF from Powerpoint video for faculty (3min) by Mandie Weinandt
Creating an accessible PDF from Excel video (6min) for faculty by Mandie Weinandt
PAC2024 PDF testing tool (Free)
PDF Techniques for WCAG (optional)
D2L PDF Testing course shell (optional)
Panorama for D2L Tutorials for faculty
Digital Accessibility Training D2L course for faculty
SDBOR QA Rubric Std. VIII for faculty