Audit our training library and identify the three most common accessibility failures in our PDFs and slide decks. Reco…
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.
| Standard | Focus | Use |
|---|---|---|
| PDF/UA | Specific to PDF documents, defines technical requirements for PDF files. | Often required for highly regulated documents to ensure technical compliance within the PDF itself. |
| WCAG | General guidelines for web content accessibility, applies to many technologies. | A broader standard used for all digital content, including PDFs, to ensure usability for people with disabilities. |
It is much better to fix accessibility problems in the original document, like a Word file. When you export an accessible source file to PDF, it keeps most of its accessibility features. This saves a lot of time and effort compared to fixing an untagged PDF after it has already been created, which can be very difficult.
The single most important step for PDF accessibility is tagging. Tagging gives the PDF a structure that screen readers can understand. Without proper tags, a PDF is very hard for people using assistive technology to navigate and read.
Yes, you can use the PDF Accessibility Auto-Tag API for many scanned PDFs. This API uses smart technology (Sensei) to tag headings, tables, lists, and paragraphs, and it also identifies the language. This allows you to automate the tagging process for a large number of documents at once.