Multi-column layout, photos, adverts, ePaper: what matters for an official gazette as a PDF – and how the administration, publisher and printer divide the work so that every issue appears in accessible form.
Background: In Germany, municipalities publish their official public notices, such as by-laws, in an official gazette (Amtsblatt). Many also publish a municipal newsletter (Mitteilungsblatt) that combines official notices with local news. Both are often typeset by a publisher and also put on the website as a PDF.
An official gazette is accessible as a PDF when a screen reader reads it out in the right order, the individual notices can be reached via headings, photos and graphics have a text alternative, and page numbers, running headers and decoration do not get in the way. Because the gazette is provided on the website as a file, it falls under the obligation for office file formats (see BITV 2.0 for German municipalities – BITV 2.0 is Germany’s federal accessibility ordinance for IT, which implements Directive (EU) 2016/2102). It is rarely difficult because of a single error, but because multi-column typesetting, boxes, adverts and a tight production schedule come together – every week or every month, all over again.
Why official gazettes are particularly prone to problems
- Multi-column typesetting: layout programs store text frames in the order in which they were created – not in reading order. Without correction, the screen reader jumps from a public notice into the middle of the club news next to it.
- Continuations: articles that continue on a later page (‘continued on page 7’) break up the context.
- Boxes and dates: information boxes, opening hours and event calendars sit freely on the page and are often read out in the wrong place.
- Many images: photos from local districts, clubs and schools, plus coats of arms, plans and symbols.
- Adverts: ready-made artwork supplied by advertisers, whose text usually exists only as an image.
- Print PDF instead of reading PDF: the printer needs a print PDF; that PDF then often ends up on the website unchanged and without tags.
Reading order in multi-column layouts
The reading order of a PDF is the order in the tag tree, not the visual arrangement (WCAG technique PDF3). For an official gazette, this rule has proved effective: one article after another; within an article, column by column; boxes directly after the article they belong to; running header, issue number and page number as artefacts. References such as ‘continued on page 7’ become links so that readers can follow the continuation. The quickest way to see whether the order is right is a screen reader: have the first two pages read aloud and follow along (how to test it yourself).
Headings and navigation
- H1: the title of the issue, for example ‘Official Gazette of the Municipality of Musterstadt, No. 12/2026’.
- H2: the sections – Official notices, News from the town hall, News from the local districts, Clubs, Churches.
- H3: the individual notice or news item.
- Table of contents and bookmarks: link the entries and generate bookmarks from the headings. Anyone looking for a particular notice should not have to listen through 24 pages.
Photos, captions, plans
Every informative image needs alt text; purely decorative elements become artefacts. For photos with a caption, the caption usually already carries the message. The alt text should then not repeat it word for word, but at most add what the image shows in addition. Overview maps in public notices – for example showing the area covered by a local development plan (Bebauungsplan) – need alt text that describes the location in words; the legally binding boundary should be in the text anyway. How to write good alt text is explained in Writing good alt text.
Adverts: artefact or content?
It is tempting to mark adverts as artefacts – then they are dealt with as far as checking tools are concerned. In substance this is usually wrong: artefacts are content without informational value, such as rules, backgrounds or repeated page numbers. An advert with opening hours and a telephone number contains information that sighted readers get and screen reader users then do not. A cleaner approach is to place adverts as separate sections at the end of a page’s reading order and to give image adverts a short alt text (‘Advertisement: Example Bakery, Hauptstraße 5, telephone …’).
EU Directive 2016/2102 does exclude third-party content that is neither funded nor developed by, nor under the control of, the public body. Whether this applies to adverts in a publication that the municipality issues or has issued on its behalf cannot be answered across the board – you should not rely on it without a legal review. A pragmatic option is to also provide the official section as a separate, carefully checked file.
ePaper or PDF?
Many publishers offer official gazettes as a page-turning ePaper. Such a viewer is itself web content and must be operable by keyboard and accessible to screen readers; if it only shows page images, it does not help blind people. Ask the provider whether the viewer outputs the text layer and structure, and in any case offer the accessible PDF for download. Notices are most accessible when they are also published as an HTML page on the website.
Dividing the work with publisher and printer
- Set it out in the contract: in addition to the print PDF, the publisher supplies a tagged PDF conforming to PDF/UA-1 – with a test result and a fixed deadline before the publication date.
- Prepare the typesetting: in the layout program, reading order and tags can be prepared via articles and paragraph styles with export tags. Once set up properly, this carries every issue.
- Contributions from departments: supply texts in Word with styles and alt text (Word guide), not scans of printouts.
- Acceptance: check every issue automatically and have samples read aloud before it goes online.
- Back issues: older issues published before 23 September 2018 are exempt, unless they are needed for active administrative processes. If a by-law that is still in force exists only in an old issue, there is a strong case for providing the current version separately in accessible form.
Common mistakes
- The untagged print PDF is put straight on the website.
- The reading order runs line by line across all columns.
- Adverts are hidden wholesale as artefacts or remain silent graphics.
- The coat of arms in the running header is announced again on every page instead of being an artefact.
- The table of contents is not linked, bookmarks are missing.
- Hyphens from justified text split words when read aloud because they are not encoded as soft hyphens.
How DokAudit helps
In the document hub you file each issue in a project called ‘Official gazette’. The fully automatic mode generates tags and a reading order that also follows multi-column layouts, marks up headings, marks running headers and footers as artefacts, links the table of contents, generates bookmarks and, for photos with a caption, adopts the caption as alt text. DokAudit then checks again with veraPDF and its own checks of the logical structure; the test report is supplied as HTML and PDF. What a machine cannot decide – whether the order is right in terms of content, whether alt texts for plans and graphics are accurate, how to deal with adverts – remains the task of the editorial team. If the publisher supplies the issues electronically, the check can be built into the workflow via the API.
Sources:
As of: 09/2026. This article gives a general overview and is not legal advice. The legal and standards texts in force are authoritative; in individual cases, the law of the German states (Länder) may differ.