Accessibility in 5

Tammy: Welcome to Accessibility in 5, a series from UFIT where we explore a quick tip on making your content more accessible in five minutes or less. I’m Tammy, and today’s topic is making PDFs accessible in Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Let’s face it. Making PDFs accessible in Adobe Acrobat is not the easiest. It is much quicker to create accessible documents in a platform such as Microsoft word or Google docs. But, sometimes, things happen, and you are left with a PDF and do not have access to the original document source. That’s when Adobe Acrobat can help.

Although Adobe Acrobat has an accessibility checker, it doesn’t adhere to a set standard like WCAG, so you will ultimately need to manually check some areas. Two important things that affect how a screen reader reads a document are reading order and accessibility tags. This video will show you how to manage both.

To begin, it’s important to understand that the reading order and tags in a PDF allows screen readers to read it in a way that makes sense. Tags are like labels that define the structure and content of a PDF.

They ensure that the document's content is presented in a logical order, making it accessible to people using assistive technologies. For example, tags allow a screen reader to determine what content is a heading, a paragraph, or an image. Purposeful tagging will allow a user to skip through a document much like a sighted reader would scan a newspaper.

Here’s how to get started.

First, open the accessibility tool to see if tags are in place. Click on All tools in the top right. This will display the tools on the left side pane. If you do not see All tools, you may need to click edit PDF first.

Then search for Prepare for accessibility in the left All tools pane. If you do not see it, click View more at the bottom.

Depending on your needs, choose the appropriate accessibility tool.

Because my PDF already has some tags in place, I am going to start with check for accessibility.

When I do that, the options panel opens.

I can choose the pages to be checked.

I will leave all these options checked.

Then click Start Checking

A panel opens that will show me the areas that passed or that have issues.

Notice the two concerns are to manually check the Reading Order and the Color Contrast. For today, we are going to focus on the reading order.

I can get a more specific report by clicking on the three dots at the top right and choosing Show Report. It tells me again to check the reading order.

To begin checking the Reading Order and Tags, you will first need to add these tools to your tool selections on the right side of the screen.

Simply move your cursor to the right side here and do a right click.

You will want to add the Order and Accessibility tags icons.

Now, I can click on the Order icon to see how the items are numbered. These numbers indicate the order the screen reader will read the document, so it is important to make sure the content is numbered correctly.

So, you can see by clicking on each box which part of the PDF is linked to that number.

Next, let’s take a look at the accessibility tags in the document. Looking back at my document, notice that one area that has not passed is the document’s title. This is an important tag to consider because it let’s the users know what the document is about, and it also helps documents to be found online.

To do this, click on Menu at the top and find Document Properties.

Click Description and complete at least the Title.

Author, Subject, and Keywords are optional.

Now click Initial View. In the Show dropdown, change it to Document Title.

Next, we will focus on the other tags by clicking on the tag’s icon here on the right.

One way to understand tags is that you are creating an order like an outline where some items may be nested under others.

You can check the tags by clicking on the accessibility tag icon. This will display a tag pane where you can view how your document is tagged.

Using a clear heading structure in your document allows a screen reader to navigate between major concepts, like how you would scan an outline with key topics.

To make changes to the tags, you can do the following:

To move a tagged item, simply click and drag the item in the tag pane.

To retag an item, right click on the tag in the tag pane, then click Properties.

Choose the correct tag from the dropdown, then click Close.To create new tags,

Click on the area in the Accessibility tag pane where you would add a tag.

Right click and choose new tag.

Then choose the type of tag and OK.

You may need to drag the tag to the appropriate place.

The Fix reading order tool found in the Prepare for Accessibility pane is also helpful for adding tags. This will help you to add a tag and to link it to the PDF content.

First, click on Fix Reading Order.

The Reading Order pane opens, but notice the options are grayed out.

I must do a left click with the mouse to place a box around the content that I want to tag.

Once that is done the Reading Order pane opens up for me to choose an appropriate tag.

If the tag you need is not listed here, choose something like paragraph,

Then go to the tag pane and change it with a right click and choose properties.

This is how you can make your PDFs more accessible using Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Thanks for watching! Tune in next time when we talk about the read order in PowerPoint.