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ADOBE ACROBAT 7.0
6
Section 1: Accessibility and Adobe PDF
Adobe is committed to providing solutions that improve the accessibility of Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and the content
of PDF documents. Since 1997, for instance, Adobe has maintained the
www.adobe.com/accessibility
website
(formerly access.adobe.com), which offers free PDF-to-text and PDF-to-HTML conversion services. In 2001, Adobe
enhanced the PDF specification to enable people to create tagged PDF documents in Acrobat, and subsequent
enhancements have extended this functionality. Assistive technology can now present the contents of tagged PDF
documents to users in a logical reading order, as well as provide information about page elements, such as figures,
that were once inaccessible to people with disabilities.
What makes Adobe PDF documents accessible
To be considered accessible, Adobe PDF documents must have the following characteristics.
Note: Some authoring applications can generate PDF documents that meet most, if not all, of these accessibility criteria.
To repair a PDF document that doesn't meet all of these criteria, you must edit the document by using Acrobat 7.0 Profes-
sional. Acrobat 7.0 Standard supports only some of the functionality that is necessary to make PDF documents accessible.
1. The document is a searchable text file, not an image-only scan
An Adobe PDF document of a scanned piece of paper is inherently inaccessible because the content of the document
is an image, not searchable text. Assistive technology cannot read or extract the words, users cannot select or edit the
text, and you cannot manipulate the PDF document for accessibility. Once you properly apply optical character
recognition (OCR) to the scanned file, however, the image becomes searchable text with selectable graphics, and you
can apply other accessibility features to the document.
Both Acrobat 7.0 Professional and Acrobat 7.0 Standard include utilities for capturing scans and for converting
scanned images to searchable PDF documents.
2. The document's form fields, if any, are accessible
Some Adobe PDF documents are forms that a person is to complete by using a computer. To be accessible, these PDF
forms must have interactive (fillable) form fields, descriptions of form fields that screen readers can read, and a preset
tab order that helps users navigate among the form fields.
To set up these features for PDF forms, you can use Acrobat 7.0 Professional or LiveCycle Designer.
3. Document structure is indicated by tags
Accessible Adobe PDF documents use tags to indicate the structural elements of a document—such as which page
elements are titles, headings, figures, text, tables, and so on—and how these elements relate to each other. These tags
are analogous to the paragraph styles, HTML tags, or XML tags you might use in a non-PDF document. Different
kinds of assistive technology may process document structures in different ways. However, using a consistent tagging
system nearly always produces better accessibility results for people with disabilities than if you do not use tags at all.
You can prepare some documents for proper tagging before you convert them to PDF, or you can use Acrobat Profes-
sional (recommended) or Acrobat Standard to add tags to documents that have already been converted to PDF.
4. Reading order is clear and easy to follow
A fourth characteristic of an accessible Adobe PDF document is that it has a logical, easy-to-follow reading order.
Assistive technology is designed to read page content in the order in which it receives the content from an application
such as Acrobat or Adobe Reader. If the content is not presented to the assistive technology in a logical reading order
(such as if a heading comes after its body text, or a figure caption is not near its figure description), people with
disabilities may not be able to understand the content.
Tagging a PDF document usually establishes an appropriate, structured reading order. For complex PDF documents,
you may need to fix the reading order by using Acrobat 7.0 Professional.
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