If you are like most government agencies, your website is full of PDFs. You create them for meeting agendas, annual reports, public notices, forms, and the list goes on. You have thousands on your website.
They are easy to make and our tools make them the path of least resistance.
But PDFs are both a usability and an accessibility problem.
They’re:
- Hard to read on phones
- Slow to load
- Clunky and break navigation
- Expensive to make accessible
- A liability
Why we make PDFs
Here are some reasons PDFs get made. How many resonate with you?
- It’s hard to make web content and easy to make a PDF.
- I can make a PDF look better than my website.
- We’ve always made this thing as a PDF.
- I don’t have access to the website, but I’ve got Word and Adobe.
- Some of my users may want to print this.
- It’s not easy to format certain PDF content as a web page.
It’s no wonder why we have so many PDFs.
Many PDFs have specific design elements
Most government PDFs fall into these categories:
- Meetings (agenda, minutes, reports)
- Reports (many are short, but some are really long and complex)
- Policy (ordinances, resolutions, codes, regulations)
(There are others too, but they’re lower volume: correspondence, event flyers, forms, handouts.)
These documents usually have specific formatting or design elements that help us understand, trust, and easily recreate them. While these design characteristics can be achieved using standard desktop publishing tools, it’s harder to create them on a basic web page.
What is a content type?
Most government CMS products (the software you use to manage web content) come with a set of content types for common things, such as:
- Page
- News post
- Event listing
Content types display information in a specific way. It’s like a predefined template that structures content consistently.
Page is usually the most flexible. But it takes a lot of time and skill to adapt the basic page content type for things like meeting agendas, long reports, or official letters.
Government website editors need more content types so they can make fewer PDFs.
What if we had more purpose-built content types?
If CMS products gave governments more content types for information they often publish as PDFs, we wouldn’t default to PDFs so often.
For example, imagine an Agenda content type pre-formatted to look like a meeting agenda. It already includes standard content that doesn’t change (like the Word template you use today). You just need to enter:
- Date, time, location
- Agenda items
- Links to supporting materials (also preferably not PDFs)
Another commonly found PDF is a long report. Imagine if you had a Report content type that included:
- Publication date
- Plain language summary
- Table of contents
- Pagination
- Embedded charts and tables
- Downloadable datasets
Or a Correspondence content type that included:
- Letterhead graphic
- Type (letter, email)
- Date sent/received
- Signature field
If we had easy to use content types within a CMS for the most common kinds of PDFs, accessible web content could become the path of least resistance.
More content types, please
Government content should be web text (HTML) by default. PDFs should be rare and have a good reason for being so. But without CMS tools that match the reality of government publishing needs, PDFs will keep winning by default.
Government CMS providers should focus on expanding purpose-built content types to help staff publish complex, structured information. Depending on your CMS, you could potentially solve this with layout templates, widgets, or patterns (instead of content types).
Solutions should address:
- Common, high-volume PDFs
- Accessibility
- Mobile-first design
People don’t like PDFs. Let’s make websites people don’t hate.
Related PDF things
But someone needs to print this
Here’s a recent presentation from government accessibility experts on how to make webpages print properly: That doesn’t need to be a PDF from Great Lakes ADA Center.
But we have so many PDFs already
Very cool to see LocalGov Drupal working on a tool to migrate PDFs to HTML. Here’s their PDF importer GitHub if you want to fund, track, and contribute.