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Acrobat 7.0 has tools to enable you to bring all three types of documents into the PDF accessibility workflow.
A. Scanned text is an image of the words and is inaccessible to people with disabilities. B. Searchable text is available for editing and manipula-
tion, much as if the author used a keyboard to type the text. Searchable text is accessible to people with disabilities.
Applying OCR to image-only Adobe PDF scans
Scanned documents that have been saved as image-only Adobe PDF documents are not accessible to screen readers
until you apply OCR to them. The content is merely a graphic, rather than text that assistive technology can read and
interpret. To assistive technology, an image-only page is a blank page.
Acrobat Professional and Acrobat Standard can apply OCR to convert image-only scans to accessible content. You
must, however, activate the Formatted Text & Graphics setting in the OCR tool, so that Acrobat processes both the
text and the graphics on a page. When this setting is active, words become searchable text that Acrobat can analyze
and tag for document structure, and graphics become selectable figures to which you can add alternate text for acces-
sibility.
To apply OCR to Adobe PDF scans that are intended for the PDF accessibility workflow:
Open the image-only Adobe PDF scan in Acrobat 7.0.
1
Select Document > Recognize Text Using OCR.
2
In the Recognize Text dialog box, click Edit.
3
In the Recognize Text Settings dialog box, select Formatted Text & Graphics from the PDF Output Style list box,
4
and then click OK.
In the Recognize Text dialog box, select a page range, and then click OK.
5
Select the Formatted Text & Graphics option when you are applying OCR to create an accessible PDF document.
Section 5: Converting scans to accessible Adobe PDF content
ADOBE ACROBAT 7.0
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