Reused by Catalyst Resources with permission from SCVO.

<aside> 💪🏼 Difficulty level: easy

Estimated time to complete: 60 mins

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<aside> 👋🏽 This task will help you remove a PDF from your website and replace it with a normal webpage.

When you’ve done this task you will:

• Have made life easier for your users (especially any that rely on screen readers to read your website)
• Learnt how to replace a PDF with a webpage
• Feel more confident about replacing other longer PDFs </aside>

<aside> 💁🏾‍♀️ Tip: add this page to your web browser’s bookmarks. That way you can easily find it again.

</aside>

Background

“PDFs are meant for distributing documents that users will print. They’re optimised for paper sizes, not browser windows or modern device viewports. We often see users get lost in PDFs because the print-oriented view provides only a small glimpse of the content. Users can’t scan and scroll around in a PDF like on a web page. Content is split up across sheets of paper, which is fine for printed documents, but causes severe usability problems online.” - Nielsen Norman Group, online usability experts

Step 1

Find a PDF on your website that:

• is short
• contains important information
• isn’t there for people to print and fill in (e.g. PDF forms are not suitable for this).

Step 2

Log into your website’s CMS and add a new page to your website. Make it a sub-page of the page that linked to the PDF, if you can.

Step 3

Copy content from the PDF to the new webpage. It may be easier to copy from the original word version of the PDF (if there is one). You may need to find the originals of any images.

Format subheadings to be H2, rather than bold normal text. This helps people scan your page content.

Add alt text to any images you add to the page.

“Also called alt tags and alt descriptions, alt text is the written copy that appears in place of an image on a webpage if the image fails to load on a user's screen. This text helps screen-reading tools describe images to visually impaired readers and allows search engines to better crawl and rank your website.” - Hubspot

Step 4

Replace any website links to the PDF with links to the new webpage.