An accessible PDF is a document that can be easily accessed, navigated, and read by people with disabilities, primarily vision impairment. And Adobe’s PDF accessibility features easily allow PDFs to be accessed with the help of assistive software or devices, such as screen readers and magnifiers, text-to-speech software, Braille displays, alternative input devices, and speech recognition software.
If your document is created without considering PDF accessibility, you may not be able to share critical information with people who need it. By just ensuring accessibility, you can disseminate your PDF’s content without limitations and protect your company from accessibility-related lawsuits.
However…
Both accessible and inaccessible PDFs are vertically identical, so it can be tricky to tell if a PDF is accessible just by looking at it. So, it’s advisable to use an effective pdf accessibility tool to make your PDF accessible or check your PDF for accessibility.
In this article, we have explained how to check a PDF document for accessibility in a few ways. Let’s get started.Â
Table of Contents
How to Check for Accessibility in PDF?
Let’s understand how to check for PDF accessibility:
1. Check the Text in the Document.
This is the simplest method to check the accessibility of a PDF.
Select the text in the PDF document. You can either try selecting the text or click on Edit on the top menu and then select All.
If the entire page is selected (including graphics) instead of just the text, then the document is an image file and is, therefore, not accessible.
What to do?
If you cannot select just text, convert the file to text by clicking on View > Tools > Recognize Text.
Note: This is the first method to check PDF accessibility. Even if you’re able to select the text, you cannot ascertain the accessibility of the document. You will still need to perform other checks.
2. Check if the Document is Tagged.
Tags are used to identify the type of content. It adds behind-the-scenes coding to the PDF document and stores the attributes related to the content. In addition to this, tags also arrange documents in a hierarchical structure.
An untagged PDF is always inaccessible, which means that if you cannot find tags of a PDF document, it is not accessible.
What to do?
To make your PDF document accessible, you need to tag the document since they provide the primary structure on which accessibility is built. So, click on View in the top menu bar. And then click on Tools > Accessibility > Add Tags to the document.
3. Check for Lingering Errors.
Once you are done tagging your document, open Adobe’s built-in accessibility checker. The accessibility checker retrieves a report that consists of the list of items, such as Page Content, Document, etc. These items consist of information about sub-items, such as Title, Bookmarks, Tagged PDF, Primary Language, etc.
Each item is preceded by an icon indicating whether the things pass, fail, or require manual inspection. Before the item, a green tick icon means that the item has passed the accessibility check, while a red X icon indicates that the item has failed the check.
What to do?
In the case of failed items, right-click on the item to see what you can do to fix the problem. You can also learn more about them to figure out how to fix the accessibility issue.
4. Check Accessibility Through a PDF Validator.
This is an alternate option if you do not want to use Adobe’s built-in accessibility checker. PDF validators are usually a plugin that runs different checks on the PDF document to verify its accessibility. The overall job of the plugin is to check if the document is compliant with the accessibility guidelines and standards.
Conclusion
Checking PDF accessibility is a fairly easy task. You can refer to this article and follow the instructions step-by-step, and you will be good to go.
I hope this was helpful!
