Fix One Thing: Friends Don't Let Friends Upload Flyers
Make your library's website more accessible (and usable) one fix at a time.
Maybe you or your PR person spent a lot of time on that flyer. Perhaps it required several rounds of proofing and approvals. It might look absolutely stunning. But, no matter how good it looks, it doesn’t belong on your library’s website.
Posting a flyer as a PDF may feel like the fastest way to get event information onto a website, but it creates significantly more problems than it solves. A flyer is designed to be glanced at on a wall, bulletin board, table, or on a social media feed.
A website is different.
People come to a website looking for specific event information: what the event is, when it happens, where it is, who it is for, whether registration is required, and what they need to do next. When all of that information is locked inside a flyer, especially one designed as a visual poster, the website isn’t being helpful: it’s acting like a filing cabinet. One that almost no one is going to bother to go through. And the problems for users begin to pile up.
PDFs are inherently inaccessible, especially when they are mostly images of text. If the flyer was designed in Canva, Photoshop, or another design tool and then exported as a PDF, there is a good chance the actual event information is not real, selectable, properly structured text. That creates barriers for people using screen readers, people who need to enlarge text, people using high contrast settings, and more.
PDFs are a mess on mobile. If you’ve ever had to deal with a PDF on your phone, then I probably don’t need to elaborate here. It’s an awful user experience. A poster that looks decent when printed often becomes a tiny, pinch-and-zoom nightmare on a small screen. Users may have to scroll sideways, zoom in, zoom out, and drag the page around just to find the date or registration link. That is not a minor inconvenience. Personally, I’ve gotten to the point where I almost refuse to open PDFs on my phone at all.
Mobile users are not special edge cases anymore; they are often the majority of your site’s audience. That means that users with disabilities not only have all the usability challenges inherent to PDFs, but it all becomes exacerbated on mobile. WCAG 2.1 partially addresses this through Success Criterion 1.4.10: Reflow, which is about making sure content can be presented at small viewport widths without forcing users to scroll in two different directions. That means PDFs are almost always going to violate 1.4.10 on a mobile device.
PDFs are terrible for search and SEO. Search engines, site search tools, and users all do better when important event information exists as HTML directly on the page. A page with a real title, headings, date, time, location, description, registration link, and contact information is far easier to find and for search engines to scan. If all of that information is locked up in “preschool-storytime-at-the-library.pdf,” it’s not exposed to outside search tools. At all.
Your website should not make people decode a poster. It should give them the information they came for, in a way they can access it. I know you really liked the flyer’s design but, remember: Libraries are about providing information. If people can’t access our information, what are we even doing?