Support training is tomorrow and accessibility flagged our help manual as unusable with assistive tech. I don’t want t…
Open your PDF document in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Go to the Tools tab and add the Accessibility tools to your workspace if they are not already present.
Best practiceYou can customize your workspace to keep accessibility tools handy for repeated use.
Select Accessibility from the Tools pane, then run Full Check to identify issues.
Review the Accessibility Checker panel's results and expand each issue to see details.
Right-click on an issue and choose Fix if available, or select Explain for guidance.
NoteSome issues can be fixed automatically, but many require manual remediation.
For reading order issues, open the Reading Order panel from the left Navigation pane and drag items to the correct sequence.
Best practiceUse the Reading Order panel to visually confirm and adjust the logical reading sequence for screen readers.
For tag issues, right-click in the Navigation pane and enable the Tags panel, then edit, add, or rearrange tags as needed.
Best practiceRenaming tags with F2 can help clarify structure for assistive technologies.
To add or edit alternative text, right-click images in the Tags panel and choose Properties, then enter descriptive alt text.
NoteAlt text is essential for non-text content to be accessible to screen readers.
For headings, ensure heading tags (such as H1, H2) are applied to section titles in the Tags panel; right-click and change tag type if needed.
After making changes, rerun the Full Check to confirm all issues are resolved.
Best practiceIteratively check and fix until no critical issues remain.
You can right-click on specific accessibility checker results to get explanations or attempt automatic fixes directly from the panel.
This runs in the Acrobat app - there is no separate API for this task.
PDF tagging is crucial because it creates a hidden structure for the document. This structure allows screen readers and other assistive technologies to understand the content's order and meaning. Without tags, a screen reader might read text out of order or skip important information, making the PDF unusable for someone with a visual impairment.
| Standard | Focus | Scope |
|---|---|---|
| WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) | General accessibility for all web content | Technology-agnostic (applies to websites, documents, etc.) |
| PDF/UA (PDF - Universal Accessibility) | Specific accessibility for PDF documents | PDF-specific (ensures PDF features support accessibility) |
Yes, you can still work towards making a blurry scanned PDF accessible. Acrobat's auto-tagging feature, powered by Sensei, can process both native and scanned PDFs. It tries to identify headings, tables, lists, and paragraphs. However, a blurry scan might make it harder for the automation to be accurate, so you will likely need more manual review and correction of the tags and reading order.
You need to check the reading order because automated tagging, while helpful, doesn't always get it perfectly right. The software tries its best to guess the logical flow of content, but complex layouts, sidebars, or unusual text arrangements can confuse it. Manually verifying and fixing the reading order ensures that screen readers present the content in a way that makes sense to the user, matching the visual order.