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Chapter 10: Accessibility, tags, and reflow
Accessibility features assist people with disabilities—such as mobility impairments, blindness, and low vision—in
their use of Adobe Acrobat and Adobe PDFs.
Accessibility features
About accessibility features
A document or application is accessible if it can be used by people with disabilities—such as mobility impairments,
blindness, and low vision—and not just by people who can see well and use a mouse. Accessibility features in Adobe
Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) make it easier for people with disabilities to
use PDF documents and forms, with or without the aid of assistive software and devices such as screen readers,
screen magnifiers, and braille printers.
Making PDFs accessible tends to benefit all users. For example, the underlying document structure that makes it
possible for a screen reader to properly read a PDF out loud also makes it possible for a mobile device to correctly
reflow and display the document on a small screen. Similarly, the preset tab order of an accessible PDF form helps
all users—not just users with mobility impairments—fill the form more easily.
Accessibility features in Acrobat and Reader fall into two broad categories: features to make the reading of PDF
documents more accessible and features to create accessible PDF documents. To create accessible PDF documents,
you must use Acrobat, not Reader.
Features for accessible reading of PDFs
• Preferences and commands to optimize output for assistive software and devices, such as saving as accessible text
for a braille printer
• Preferences and commands to make navigation of PDFs more accessible, such as automatic scrolling and opening
PDFs to the last page read
• Accessibility Setup Assistant for easy setting of most preferences related to accessibility
• Keyboard alternates to mouse actions
• Reflow capability to temporarily present the text of a PDF in a single easy-to-read column
• Read Out Loud text-to-speech conversion
• Support for screen readers and screen magnifiers
Features for creating accessible PDFs
• Creation of tagged PDFs from authoring applications
• Conversion of untagged PDFs to tagged PDFs
• Security setting that allows screen readers to access text while preventing users from copying, printing, editing,
and extracting text
• Ability to add text to scanned pages to improve accessibility
• Tools for editing reading order and document structure
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