PDF documents

Adobe Acrobat Pro or (DC) is your best friend.

By:

Amy Whitesall

Issue: PDFs created from scanned or inaccessible documents need to be “tagged” in order to make them accessible

Who’s affected: Screen reader users, keyboard users

Standard: Guideline 1.3.1 Info and Relationships, Guideline 1.3.2 Meaningful Sequence

What to do: First, make sure you have a copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro or Acrobat DC on your computer. The University provides a license to the full Adobe Creative Suite for faculty, students and staff.

PDFs are typically created from source documents created in a Microsoft Office or a Google product. The easiest way to make a pdf accessible is to create it from an accessible source document (or go back and edit the source doc to make it accessible, then reproduce the pdf).

screen snippet showing location of the accessibility checker in microsoft word
Born accessible – make a PDF

Once you’ve determined that your source document is accessible:

  • Use your chosen software’s native “File > Save/Download > Download as PDF” functionality to output a PDF
  • Open it in Adobe Acrobat DC and run the Accessibility checker
  • Remediate if necessary based on the Accessibility checker results
Remediation: When you don’t have access to the source document

This happens a lot. To fix an inaccessible PDF use Adobe’s help documentation. It’s going to be the most up-to-date and accurate for your version of acrobat.  Adobe: create and verify PDF accessibility

Remediation steps:

  1. Adding metadata
  2. Adding and touching up tags
  3. Fine-tune reading order and tab order
  4. Checking your work
Remediation: Make a scanned document accessible

Use Acrobat DC’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool, then follow remediation steps.

Adobe help sheet on editing scanned documents

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