“Hello, and welcome to the Visual Accessibility Skills Toolkit, or ‘VAST’!

VAST is a series of short articles aiming to spread awareness about visual impairments and their associated access requirements, followed by a series of guides that will help you to use accessibility tools in Adobe programs.

The goal of VAST is to help make the average self-published document more accessible than it currently is.

If you’re already certified to work in accessibility-focused pre-press or PDF remediation, you’ll probably be familiar with everything covered in these guides (and more), and may want to aim for a specific standard, such as W3C’s WCAG 2.1.

VAST is divided into three sections:

  1. Visual Impairment 101 explores what visual impairments are, how visually impaired people navigate digital content, and introduces some current language and definitions (circa 2023).

  2. Screen reading PDFs explores the basics of how screen readers navigate through digital content.

  3. Using InDesign introduces different tools that designers can use to make their documents more accessible.”