Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority

Web and PDF Accessibility

Los Angeles (LA) Metro Board of Directors initiated an effort to make Metro’s services and infrastructure more accessible to the visually impaired. This comprehensive initiative included an update of Metro’s website (www.metro.net) to ensure that the information about schedules, routes, fare, trip planning and customer comment forms on Metro’s website is accessible to the visually impaired in accordance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and Section 508 of Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

SymSoft Solutions is working with the LA Metro to make the rider-related information on the Metro web site accessible. This includes the web pages and PDF files for the routes, schedules, and fare information. The PDF files were originally created using Adobe InDesign and making them accessible posed unique challenges due to the limitations of these tools, especially in the area of processing of accessibility tags during the PDF generation.

SymSoft team developed a systematic process and worked collaboratively with the Metro team to first treat the InDesign files, generate the PDF files, and then fix the accessibility issues in the generated PDF files. The converted files were then validated for compliance with the WCAG priority 2 checkpoints and Section 508 guidelines. We also tested the files with real users with disabilities to make sure that the files are not only compliant, but usable by people with disabilities.

We are now proceeding to revise the web pages and metro’s trip planner application to make it compliant with the WCAG priority 2 checkpoint.
 

Services Provided:

PDF and Web Accessibility Analysis, Remediation, Compliance Validation and Testing, Accessibility Training