Are PDFs Killing Your Higher Ed Enrollment?

Have you ever gone to a restaurant’s website hoping to look at a menu, click on the link, and get a PDF instead of a webpage? That’s frustrating. Especially when you’re on a phone, it can be difficult to read a PDF. You spend a lot of time pinching and zooming to read everything in the document, and then you can’t really do anything with it. Higher education has the same problem. PDFs are not the most accessible way to share information, yet many marketing teams default to them.

Think about it. You have your viewbook, course catalogs, financial aid guides, policies, and even academic calendars to share with students. It seems easy to put the relevant information in a PDF you can email over and over, but you are making it difficult for everyone to read. PDF resources create massive barriers for prospective and current students.

PDFs feel easy. You can export them quickly without needing help from your development team. However, even accessible PDFs in higher education start with the realization that they may not be the best tool for sharing information. That extra time it would take to create a webpage with the relevant information will save everyone a lot of headaches.

In this article, we are going to break down the barriers in PDFs, outline the process you should use for digital information, and show how to start improving PDF accessibility.

I won’t tell you who, but one higher education institution I work with has just announced that PDFs are no longer allowed on its website. At all. They’ve sent countless emails to people with editing access, saying they aren’t allowed to upload PDFs. Instead, everyone has been instructed to create webpages for any information they intend to share.

Why did they go to this extreme? Because making PDFs fully accessible is time-intensive. The web team understands that regular faculty and staff members won’t have the tools or expertise to go through the process.

This doesn’t mean you can’t make PDFs accessible. There are document-accessibility experts who do this work every single day. But PDFs, in general, create so many barriers and are so often not subjected to any kind of editing process that they could be the hidden reason your website doesn’t pass WCAG compliance.

What is it about PDFs that causes all of these problems? While the list is long, let’s break down some of the most important issues.

Think of that nice PDF document you made as a tiny website. That was designed to work only on a desktop. If you don’t remember the dark ages of the mobile internet, we used to have to pinch and zoom around a website to get it to work on our phones. PDFs work exactly like this.

They do not respond to screen size, so that great graphic you designed in Canva is now nearly impossible for some of your audience to read. This is made worse by the fact that most of Gen Z do most of their searching on their phones. Plus, over 50% of Gen Z use social media as their primary search engine, so they’re reaching your website on their phones.

You can absolutely track PDF downloads, but you lose a lot of information in the process. On your website, you can track how far someone reads down a page, where they get stuck, and what they click on.

A PDF, again, basically operates as a tiny website. It’s not connected to your Google Analytics or any data tracking software. You can use UTM codes or short links to track clicks, but this can be easily overlooked.

Without relevant data, you can’t make the marketing decisions you need to in order to reach your prospective students.

Losing that data can be a big hit to your SEO, too. When someone clicks on a PDF link, they more or less leave your website. Which means you lose out on Google seeing people dig deeper into it (a big factor in your SEO rankings).

Google also wants to index your content; it doesn’t like it when there are barriers for its bots, either. PDFs can cause issues for indexing relevant content. This means your website is harder for students to find in their first search.

Beyond the user experience and strategic issues PDFs create, they also cause many accessibility issues. Making accessible PDFs in higher education means understanding where and why they fail.

Unfortunately, you can’t just download a design from Canva and have it work. Let’s take a look at why.

Every PDF should have hidden digital tags that help screen readers understand a PDF. While these are added automatically with a lot of design tools, they are not always correct. Without tags, a PDF is just a flat image, making it essentially invisible to blind or low-vision students.

This can be made even worse if you export a file incorrectly, which turns the PDF into a flat graphic. Every PDF needs to be properly tagged so its information is clear to anyone using assistive tools.

Assistive tools like screen readers will automatically read your documents left to right. This is great in most cases, but if you have multiple-column layouts (normal in your Viewbooks), it can mix up the actual order. Depending on how your PDF was created, your reading order can be incorrectly tagged by your design tool and put images above text, too.

The great news? You can manually adjust the reading order of a document. But fixing this in a multi-page document can take a lot of time.

Just like you need to add alternative text to your images on a website, you need to do so in a PDF. Without these descriptions, your images are basically useless for people using assistive tools. They may be told that an image is there, but they’ll miss the context entirely. This can be especially bad if infographics are used to share vital information.

This happens in the design phase of a PDF, but it is all too common: people can’t read your content. Your brand colors might not be readable in certain combinations. While you may be great at testing color contrast before you add things to your website, a lot of PDF creators are not necessarily following brand guidelines, either. If you know you can’t use that yellow with white text on your website, you can’t do that on your PDFs either. Low color contrast means that any of your students with low vision or color blindness cannot read the PDF you worked so hard on.

So, if accessible PDFs in higher education feel like a huge hurdle, what do you do? Everything should be available on a webpage. Full stop.

You can make web pages responsive so they work on whatever screen your students use. If set up correctly, they can integrate well with assistive technology (yes, this takes some work, but it’s already a better starting point). Web pages also allow for instant updates. You don’t have to upload v2_final_july2026.pdf files anymore. This is even better for people who save PDFs and come to you with inaccurate information.

This is exactly how I learned web accessibility, too. My entire job was converting PDF content into accessible HTML for the Scottish government. Did we also provide the PDF for people who wanted them? Yes. But there was always a duplicate version of the content available in fully accessible HTML.

Instead of thinking “I can just make this in Canva real quick and export a PDF,” start thinking, “I need to make this a webpage.”

I know you’ll need to work with your web team; not everyone will be thrilled with a ton of new pages on a website. But if it’s important to digitize any of this information, it’s probably important that it can be found via a Google search and on your website.

But think of the possibilities with creating web content. Instead of a PDF course catalog that people have to hunt through, you can create a searchable, online database that’s easy for students to use. Instead of a heavy PDF Viewbook, you can create an interactive landing page with videos and a live chat.

There are way more options to effectively market to prospective students on a webpage than in a document they download and then forget about.

I get that you may have hundreds of PDFs on your website now. You may also have a bit of an uphill battle to get some of your staff and faculty to stop defaulting to creating PDFs. And some documents must be PDFs for legal purposes. How can you make them accessible? You need specific tools and to follow a few steps.

If your team is using Word or Google Docs to create simple PDFs, they need to fix accessibility issues before exporting. They should use features like built-in heading styles, a clear hierarchy, large enough font sizes, and readable color contrasts.
More heavily designed documents in tools like Canva take a few more steps. You’ll need to set up your layers correctly, add ALT text, and even export the file correctly. If you use Canva, you can check out our article on improving accessibility in Canva designs.

If you don’t have the tools (or the time) to fix reading order issues, keep your layouts simple. Avoid a ton of decorative elements, multi-column layouts, or pull-quotes. Instead, stick to a simple Word-doc style layout with your text read left-to-right all the way down the document.

Before you export a PDF, use built-in accessibility checkers in Word or Canva to catch glaring errors. Within Adobe Acrobat, you can use its Prepare for Accessibility menu to run a full report and find issues you can tell it to fix.

There are also online tools like Pave that can “automatically” fix your PDFs’ accessibility. Just keep in mind that automated tools struggle with accessibility, and there may still be issues in your document.

One key thing you should always do? Define the document’s title and language. While some PDF readers will assume the file name is the document title, that may not be what you want the title to actually be. You also need to define the language so your students’ assistive tools understand what they need to do.

Setting both of these requires editing the document in Adobe Acrobat. I would argue that having Acrobat Pro is a necessity if you want to use PDFs at all. You update both of these under Properties, per Adobe’s accessibility instructions.

I totally understand that we wish that everyone could create content for students, and it wouldn’t create more work for the marketing or IT team. Unfortunately, that often causes more problems than it’s ever worth. You could be allowing staff to add things to your website that exclude more students than they help. Unfortunately, PDFs are often the biggest barrier on a large website.

Take a look at one of your largest resource documents. Open it in Acrobat and run the Accessibility Report. How many issues do you have? Now imagine how many students that’s excluding.

I get that PDFs feel “easy,” but they do more harm than good. True accessibility requires a process. Your mindset has to shift away from “what’s easy” to what actually works for prospective and current students.

Not sure how to make that a reality? We’ll be releasing our Creating Accessible Content course soon. This has the basic web accessibility process my team follows every time we add content to clients’ websites. You can be one of the first to get access. Join the waitlist now.

It’s time to make web accessibility feel doable.