Chapter 14 Accessibility; Accessibility Overview - Adobe ACROBAT 7.0.5 SDK Manual

14
Acrobat and the Acrobat SDK provide extensive support for accessibility of documents to
visually-impaired users.
This chapter consists of the following sections:

Accessibility Overview

●
Optimizing the Accessibility of PDF Documents
●
Making Forms Accessible
●
Annotations and Accessibility
●
Accessibility and Security
●
Microsoft's Active Accessibility (MSAA) Interface
●
Accessibility Overview
To enable proper vocalization, either through a screen reader or by some more direct
invocation of a text-to-speech engine, PDF supports the following features:
Specifying the natural language used for text in a PDF document—for example, as
●
English or Spanish
Providing textual descriptions for images or other items that do not translate naturally
●
into text, or replacement text for content that does translate into text but is represented
in a nonstandard way (such as with a ligature or illuminated character)
Specifying the expansion of abbreviations or acronyms
●
The core of this support lies in the ability to determine the logical order of content in a PDF
document, independently of the content's appearance or layout, through logical structure
and tagged PDF documents (see
PDF documents are created using the Acrobat Professional user interface or using the
Acrobat SDK.
An accessibility application can extract the content of a document for presentation to a
disabled user by traversing the structure hierarchy and presenting the contents of each
node. For this reason, producers of PDF files must ensure that all information in a document
is reachable via the structure hierarchy, and they are strongly encouraged to use the
facilities described in this section.
Additional guidelines for accessibility support of content published on the World Wide
Web can be found in the World Wide Web Consortium document
Guidelines
For complete details on accessibility support in PDF files, see the PDF Reference.
Acrobat SDK User's Guide
Accessibility
and its associated documents.
"Creating Tagged PDF Documents" on page 43). Tagged
Web Content Accessibility
111