Content marketing and the European Accessibility Act – from PDFs to interactive digital publishing

John Warnock, the pioneering inventor of the PDF and co-founder of Adobe, died earlier this month at the age of 82. Warnock’s innovative technology – the portable document format – changed the way documents are shared and printed. He was widely recognised for revolutionising printing and document transfer, winning several awards including the National Medal of Technology and Innovation – the highest US honour for technological innovation and achievement. 

The changing landscape of content publishing 

For professional services marketers, the PDF has long been a powerful tool in the armoury, and as the transition to digital has accelerated over the past decade or so, it has become the default option for sharing and publishing content (and indeed, it remains so today). But despite the PDF’s simplicity, modern marketers now have a broader range of options to choose from when it comes to publishing content. Some of these options offer far greater functionality, including interactivity, the opportunity to embed external elements and the ability to track engagement with the content much more accurately.  

Crucially, new publishing tools also enable marketers to meet and exceed accessibility standards for their audiences, which is especially pertinent with the advent of the European Accessibility Act, which comes into effect in 2025. This new piece of European legislation is focused on private sector organisations selling products or services to customers that live in EU member states. Like GDPR, the law applies based on the location of the customer, not the location of the organisation. For marketers, this means that whenever you sell products or services to customers in the EU, you need to meet the same standard of accessibility. 

Companies need to make sure that all their existing digital products now meet the new accessibility requirements, which may mean going through everything from website design to content production and ensuring that accessibility is integrated throughout the process. By implementing these guidelines, brands will be providing a more inclusive experience for their audiences while complying with the requirements. 

When it comes to meeting accessibility requirements, the latest digital publishing platforms offer built-in accessibility compliance as well as much more engaging options in terms of design and content production. 

Enhancing interactivity with Flourish 

In addition to our work in Shorthand, which we have written about previously on this blog, Rostrum is also producing on-brand data visualisations for clients using the platform Flourish. Flourish offers beautiful, easy and clickable data visualisation and storytelling using branded themes. The interactivity keeps users engaged, helps highlight key information and allows readers to easily explore data or content at their own pace.  

Using flexible and responsive templates, Flourish graphics work across all screen sizes ensuring content is easily accessible to readers. Potential Flourish visualisations include graphs and charts, heatmaps, timelines, text annotators, carousels, clickable biographies, number tickers and grids, as well as the option to create beautiful custom graphics in line with a campaign topic – for example ESG or real estate. Flourish allows content creators such as Rostrum to produce varied content experiences –  and having content housed in clickable elements reduces the speed of scrolling and keeps users engaged.  

The beauty of these digital tools is the ability to embed meta data and other descriptors to support readers using assistive technology such as screen readers, which means that any visuals including photos, graphs and other elements can be described easily to someone who cannot see them, which is not possible in a PDF. All Flourish graphics templates, for example, come with screen-reader descriptions for any visual aspects as standard, and any titles or subtitles are read out by screen readers by default. A majority of the clickable functions are also keyboard-navigable to support readers with motor impairments.  

Seamless integration and sharing 

In terms of platform integration, Flourish will seamlessly embed into corporate sites via a simple HTML snippet. This snippet can be placed into email marketing (as long as it supports HTML snippets), websites, Canva, Shorthand or any other page or program that supports HTML snippet format. Flourish elements can also be exported as imagery, allowing further sharing of the content or visualisation. 

Explore our work and get in touch 

For some examples of our work in Flourish, please see below:

JustAdviser navigational carousel, used on campaign homepage to help create a non-linear journey and encourage users to explore the campaign microsite:

Data visualisation to support wider content, interactive charts allow the user to explore larger data stories and allow commentary on the data itself: