Making PDFs Accessible: Finishing in Acrobat

Let’s look at this screen for just a moment. Over here on the left is what we can call the navigation pane. You’ll notice at the bottom a little luggage tag. This is the tag tree, and we’ll talk about that in detail in a moment. Over here on the right is the tools pane which gives you some tools to use to make it easier to create that accessible PDF. I’m going to collapse that right now and open my tag Tree by clicking on the luggage tag icon. You’ll notice that we have these tags that indicate the structure and the content of the document. If we select this very first H1… we’ll see the pink box around our Heading One that we created in Word It has the correct tag. The H1 tag. Same with the H2 tag. That heading is correctly tagged because we did it correctly in Word and the conversion automatically tags it correctly. We scroll down to one of the list tags, or the “L” tags We’ll notice that we now have the list and all the list items are tagged correctly. If we scroll down a little bit further, and bring the table into view in our document, we select the table tag. Because the PDF UA standard… Now, the PDF UA standard is an ISO standard that describes what is needed in the way of tags to make a document accessible. One of the things it says is the tag tree must be in the logical reading order. Because of that, I live almost completely in the tag tree and we’ve made the workflow optimized for that experience. If I select this table tag, and I right click, I can go directly into the table editor. You’ll notice because we checked those boxes… Remember those boxes in the Design tab in Word? Because we checked the boxes for the column headers and the row headers. I have them as green in my tool. And then the data cells are gray. So they automatically got created correctly. Now, there is always some work to do on tables and that is explained in the trainings that I mentioned previously. Now let’s look over here on the right side and go back to our tools pane. And I want to highlight a couple of tools that make it easier for you to create that accessible PDF document. We’ll start with the accessibility tool itself. In that are a number of tools. The first one I want to highlight is Autotag Document. This allows you to tag a PDF document that wasn’t previously tagged. Maybe you don’t have this optimum workflow where you’re working from the Word document. You can still auto-generate tags for that document and save yourself time. You can run the Accessibility Checker to check your work. And, you can Set Alternate Text, the descriptive text for the images You can do them all in one series by using the Alternate Text Tool. I’m going to close that. I want to go to the next tool I have in my list which is Organize Pages. This will allow you… If you need to edit a page in a document that has already been tagged correctly, you can pull that page out, edit it, retag it correctly, insert it back into your document, and the tag tree will automatically readjust to be in the logical reading order. The last tool I want to mention is the Prepare Form tool. The Prepare Form tool allows you to auto-detect form fields. Again, saving you time in creating that accessible PDF document. In closing, I just want to highlight that by using Acrobat Pro DC, our advanced tools, and our accessibility workflow, it will make the experience of creating an accessible PDF easier and it will save you hours of time on working on those documents. Thank you very much for your time.