Scanned documents

Thanks for joining us today to learn how to make scanned documents accessible in Acrobat Pro. Whether you’re working with historical records, printed flyers, or signed forms, scanned PDFs can be tricky. But with the right tools and techniques, you can make them readable and accessible. Today I am covering the following topics. Understanding scanned documents. Enhancing a scanned image. Cloud-based auto-tagging. And fixing common issues. Scanned documents are images. That means they don’t contain real text until you run optical character recognition, or OCR. But OCR success depends on the quality of the scan, the OCR engine that is used to recognize the text, and what’s on the page, like colored backgrounds or handwriting, which can be problematic.

Let’s start by enhancing this camera image and getting rid of the table in the background. To do this, select Scan in OCR in the All Tools pane. Next, select Enhance Camera Image and choose Document from the Content Type dropdown. Before selecting Enhance, drag the handles to adjust the page borders to get rid of the desk in the background. Notice how the document was automatically straightened, and the background is white, making it easier to read. Before tagging the document, open your preferences under Menu. Or use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl or Command plus K to make sure Enable Cloud-based Auto-tagging for Accessibility is checked under the Accessibility category. Open the Tags panel from the right menu. Select No Tags Available and choose Auto-tag Document from the Options dropdown. Acrobat not only tags the document, but runs optical character recognition, or OCR on all the text as well, eliminating the need to do this manually in Acrobat. It’s not perfect, so you’ll need to review and possibly fix headings, lists, tables, and figures. Currently, you cannot auto-tag files larger than 100 megabytes. Or use cloud-based auto-tagging on PDFs with more than 200 pages and scan PDFs with more than 100 pages. Let’s check our tags. First, notice that the content in this figure tag should be artifacted. To do this, right-click on the content or the small box icon and select Properties. In the context-sensitive menu, select Change Tag to Artifact. If this artifact was placed alone within a tag, like this one is, the empty tag should be deleted as well. Next, we’ll do a bulk change on these Level 2 headings. They should be heading 3 tags and not heading 2. I’ll select them all while holding the Ctrl key, right-click, and select Properties. Then, choose Heading Level 3 from the dropdown. Next, I need to add Alt text to the center image. I’ll do this by selecting the figure tag, right-click, and select Properties. And then just enter the Alt text description. Let’s double-check the list. It looks like it was tagged correctly. And last, I need to make sure the table has a header row. I’ll select the first row, right-click, and choose Properties. From the dropdown, select Table Header Cell. Scanned documents can be challenging, but with Acrobat’s cloud-based auto-tagging, you can get a head start on tagging.

Here’s a quick check-in on working with scanned documents. Cloud-based auto-tagging automatically recognizes the text in scanned documents. True or false? This is true. Cloud-based auto-tagging performs OCR, or optical character recognition, on scanned documents, eliminating the need to do this step manually.

And that’s it! Now you’ve learned a bit about making scanned documents accessible in Acrobat Pro.