PDF Tips and Tricks
PDFs are one of the most common forms of document on our website and in our courses, but they can also be one of the hardest to make accessible. Learn some advanced tips and tricks to making your PDFs accessible.
Check out these and other tips to help make your PDFs more accessible to users with disabilities:
- Save your accessible PDFs correctly
- Make your PDFs accessible with the "Make Accessible" Action Wizard tool
- Frequently Asked Questions
Save your accessible PDFs correctly
IMPORTANT: When saving a Microsoft Word document as an accessible PDF, there are many options for exporting the document to Adobe Acrobat. Only the traditional Save As... method has been proven to work effectively and consistently when it comes to generating and accessible PDF.
Using some of the quick save buttons in the Acrobat section of the top menu of Microsoft Word have been shown to produce PDFs with incorrect tags or other accessibility features missing.
To correctly save a Microsoft Word document as an accessible PDF in Adobe Acrobat:
- In the top menu, select 鈥淔ile鈥
- Select 鈥淪ave As鈥
- Choose a location to save the document to
- In the 鈥淪ave as type鈥 dropdown menu, choose 鈥淧DF鈥 as the type of file that you would like to save it as
- Select the 鈥淥ptions...鈥 button that appears after PDF has been selected as the file type
- In the 鈥淚nclude non-printing information鈥 section, ensure that 鈥淒ocument structure tags for accessibility鈥 has been checked (checking 鈥淐reate bookmarks using: Headings鈥 in this section is also helpful if your document is lengthier and has structured headings)
- Select 鈥淪ave鈥
The most important step here is ensuring that 鈥淒ocument structure tags for accessibility鈥 is checked. When you make your document accessible by adding the correct headings, image alt text, data table headers, and more, this option ensures that information is carried over to an Adobe Acrobat PDF in the form of tags, which share that accessibility information with screen readers and other assistive technologies. This is the only method which has been proven to successfully and consistently bring that tag information over to a PDF, as other quick save options either export the document as a PDF with incorrect tags, or omit the tags altogether.
NOTE: These instructions apply to the desktop version of Microsoft Word on a Windows PC. For Mac users, select 鈥淏est for electronic distribution and accessibility.鈥 This will ensure that the PDF is tagged when you export it.
Make your PDFs accessible with the 鈥淢ake Accessible鈥 Action Wizard tool
Adobe Acrobat comes with a lot of tools to help make your PDFs accessible, one of the most powerful of those being the 鈥淢ake Accessible鈥 Action Wizard tool. 鈥淢ake Accessible鈥 will do exactly what its name implies 鈥 make your PDF accessible. It does this by guiding you through several steps to correct common accessibility issues in your PDF, including but not limited to:
- Running OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on scanned documents
- Adding tags
- Adding image alt text
- Setting document properties such as the document title and language
- Making form fields accessible
- And more
While these fixes may not cover every accessibility issue that may exist in your document, this Action Wizard tool serves as a great starting point for quickly identifying and fixing accessibility issues in your PDF, especially if you don鈥檛 have access to the source document.
To run the 鈥淢ake Accessible鈥 Action Wizard tool:
- In the right toolbar menu, select 鈥淎ction Wizard鈥
- Select 鈥淢ake Accessible鈥
- Select 鈥淪tart鈥
- Follow the on-screen prompts and dialog boxes to correct any accessibility issues as they鈥檙e detected
Once the 鈥淢ake Accessible鈥 Action Wizard is done running, it will produce an accessibility report of any remaining accessibility issues that Adobe Acrobat has automatically detected in your PDF.
NOTE: This tool works best for simple documents. Documents with complex layouts, irregular tables, text-heavy images or graphics, or varying text styles cannot always be made accessible using this tool alone. Even if the Accessibility Check report does not indicate any accessibility issues in your document, a manual review is still required.