RE: [EXTERNAL] Re: question regarding printed PDF documents

Thank you for the clarification.

I was referring to the option within Adobe Acrobat forms to add a Signature field. This is what is being suggesting by the Accessibility team. To use that field, a signer has to pre-register with Adobe, which is a confusing process. Then, if there is a signature field added to the form, they can “sign” the form digitally. It’s not an option for us because our Legal department won’t accept it.  As a financial institution, we require a verifiable signature – one we can compare to the signature on file, or one that is validated via DocuSign’s validation process.

We have been adding all our forms to DocuSign to make our forms accessible to more people – not just people with disabilities, but also people who find it difficult to come in to a branch office. Print forms clearly don’t work for some people.

The issue was that someone on the Accessibility team, which works with our website dev team, was insisting that our PDF forms are out of compliance because there’s no field on the signature line, thus necessitating that the signer print the form. As our PDF ADA SME, it was my view that we had an ADA-compliant solution for members via our eSign option. I didn’t think WCAG applied to print documents, but I’m not the expert on that so I wanted to confirm with this group.

It's really helpful to take all these scenarios and concerns in to the meeting with Accessibility, Legal and Compliance, so we can all be better informed when making a decision.

Thanks very much!
Deborah


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Deborah Dinzes
Sr Technical Writer, Knowledge Management
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From: Guy Hickling <guy.hickling@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 16, 2024 2:49 PM
To: WAI Interest Group discussion list <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: question regarding printed PDF documents

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Deborah, by my option (1), I meant the simple process of printing out the form, then signing the paper form by hand - the method I understand your organisation currently uses. Usually after the user has completed the fields on screen first (though hand completion is also valid but more prone to error later).

But I wasn't clear when you said "We have the options of adding a signature field – I believe users have to set up a signature to use it. I found that process confusing, and Legal won’t accept it." Do you mean that you allow users to use both methods (digital signing or printing the form), but only accept the latter? That seems very strange.

So to repeat, all methods, whether digital signing or signing a signature by hand, all present problems for some disabled people (and also for others due to their equipment or their circumstances). They are all inaccessible to some people.

Take your current method of printing off the form before signing. That is obviously no good for blind people. It has two issues particularly:
a) printers frequently give problems; they can print a blank page due to the ink running out, or they corrupt the text for whatever reason, or print out of position due to wrong printer settings so that much of the text (including some of the data the user might have entered) is missing off the edge of the paper. And it can also happen that some other document was stored in the print queue and gets printed off first, so the user signs a wrong document entirely. A blind person has no way of knowing if any of those happen, and may not have a sighted person available to tell them. And b), a blind person cannot see where to sign. The solution you mention of allowing the signature to be anywhere on the page solves (b), but doesn't solve (a). I imagine a blind person would probably prefer a WCAG compliant digital signing, though I've never asked anyone about that.

But replacing that manual method by digital signing also fails for some people as I explained. Offering the user a choice of all the options is the best way to be accessible to almost everyone.


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