Create an accessible PDF in Acrobat

Transcript

Thanks for joining us today to learn about how to make PDF files accessible, starting in Acrobat. Today I am covering the following topics. How to turn on cloud-based auto-tagging. How to use the Prepare for Accessibility tools. And fixing common issues. Authoring applications like Microsoft Word usually tag PDFs during the PDF creation process, like when you use the PDF Maker add-on in Word to create a PDF. But if your PDF has not been tagged, you can use the Prepare for Accessibility tools in Acrobat to create an accessible PDF.

To check if your PDF is tagged, go to the File menu and select Document Properties. Or use the keyboard shortcut control or Command plus D. Look under the Description tab to see if the tagged PDF value in the Advanced pane is set to Yes. This PDF is not tagged, so I’ll need to tag it in Acrobat. Before tagging the document, open your preferences under the menu or use the keyboard shortcut control or Command plus K to make sure Enable Cloud-based Auto-tagging for Accessibility is checked under the Accessibility category.

To start, select a Prepare for Accessibility under the All Tools pane in the left-hand panel. First, you tag the file, then after the file is tagged, you’ll need to check the accessibility. So I’ll start by selecting Automatically tag PDF. Cloud-based tagging is the preferred tagging engine based on machine learning and is regularly updated. Currently, there are a few limitations with cloud-based auto-tagging. You cannot auto-tag files larger than 100 megabytes. Or use cloud-based auto-tagging on PDFs with more than 200 pages and scanned PDFs with more than 100 pages. After tagging the PDF, select Check for Accessibility from the Prepare for Accessibility panel. I’ll check this box because I like to embed the report in the file for easy access.

At the end of running the Check for Accessibility tool, the Accessibility Checker panel on the right pops open. All you need to do is walk down the list of issues in this panel. First, it says that the logical reading order needs to be checked. If you don’t know what this means, you can right-click and select Explain. I’ll check this in the Reading Order dialog by selecting the Tags panel and choosing Reading Order from the Options menu. Or use the keyboard shortcut X. It looks like the image in the center is out of order, so I’ll move it into the correct position.

And then double-check the second page.

It looks good, so I’ll go back to the Accessibility Checker panel, right-click on this issue, and set it to Pass. The color contrast looks good, so I’ll set this to Pass as well.

Moving down, I can see that alt text is missing from my images.

To add this, just right-click on the issue and select Fix. This opens the alt text dialog, where you can simply enter the descriptions. Once the descriptions have been added, you can update the report to reflect these changes.

After you run Check for Accessibility and correct the errors, the tag tree shows that you used a valid tag, but not necessarily the correct tag. So, I recommend walking the tree by using the down arrow key to confirm you have the right tag.

Here’s an example where the heading was tagged with H2, but it should really be H3. In fact, these four headings should all be tagged H3. You can bulk select them by holding down the Ctrl key, right-clicking, and select Properties. Then, choose Heading Level 3 from the Type dropdown. I’ll just double-check my list. It looks good because it has list item and L-body tags, and the table has header cells. Now, if you want to double-check anything, you can select Open Accessibility Report in the left-hand pane. Here you can check all the details on what has passed or been skipped in the report.

Here’s a quick check-in. After checking for accessibility, the tag tree shows that you used a valid tag, but not necessarily the correct tag. True or false? This is true. After checking for accessibility, the tag tree shows that you used a valid tag, but not necessarily the correct tag. So, you’ll need to double-check your tags. And that’s it. Now you’ve learned how to make an accessible PDF starting in Acrobat Pro.