WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

PDF Accessibility
Setting Up Acrobat

Important Tools in Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat Professional is the most common program to review and repair the accessibility of PDF files, but the essential accessibility tools are not visible by default. You must add them into your workspace. The "Accessibility tags" and "Order" panels must be added to the Navigation pane on the left side of the screen. The group of "Accessibility" tools must be added to the Tools Pane on the right.

screenshot showing the Navigation Pane on the left side of the application and the tools pane on the right side

Tip:

In Acrobat, a window that opens within a pane is called a "panel" (e.g., the Accessibility tags panel).

Below are some of the accessibility Tools that you will use regularly while reviewing and repairing PDF accessibility.

Accessibility Tags Panel

Note:

In April 2023, the name of this panel was changed from "Tags" to "Accessibility tags."

To show the Accessibility tags panel, right-click on an empty part of the Navigation Pane, and select Accessibility tags from the menu.

The Accessibility tags button is added to the Navigation pane and the panel opens.

To show or hide this panel, click the Accessibility tags button. You can also add, show, or hide Navigation panes from the main application menu: View > Show/Hide > Navigation Panes.

Order Panel

The Order panel is also located on the Navigation pane.

To add this panel, right-click on an empty part of the Navigation pane and select "Order" from the menu. This tool can be shown or hidden by clicking its icon. It can also be shown by selecting the "Show Order Panel" button on the Reading Order tool.

Accessibility Tools

To add the Accessibility tools to the Tools pane, click the Tools tab in the top-left of the window (located next to the Home tab on the toolbar). Find Accessibility and click the Add button.

The Accessibility button now appears on the Tools pane. Click it to open a group of tools in a side panel.

Accessibility Check

Use the built-in "Accessibility Check" tool to identify issues that need to be addressed. To run the checker, select Accessibility Check from the Accessibility tools panel.

Screenshot of Accessibility Check highlighted and select on the Accessibility tools panel.

The results appear in the "Accessibility Checker" panel on the left side of the window.

screenshot of an accessibility report. an error is visible: Figures alternate text - failed.

For additional information about an issue, right-click it and select Explain, and Acrobat directs you to online documentation that describes the issue, and often tells you how to fix it.

Screenshot of right-click menu with Explain highlighted and selected.

Tip

The checker will prompt you to manually check for contrast issues. Use WebAIM's Contrast Checker to ensure that your PDF meets WCAG contrast requirements..

It will also identify several other common accessibility issues, such as incorrectly-nested headings, missing alternative text, and issues with table headers. While the accessibility checker is useful to help identify accessibility issues, the best way to repair most of these issues is with the Reading Order tool.

Reading Order tool

The Reading Order tool helps you review and repair a document's structure. To use this tool, go to the Accessibility toolbar and select Reading Order. A dialog appears.

Tag types

The following table lists the labels on the most commonly-used buttons in the Reading Order tool, and the tag type associated with each button.

Reading Order tool tagging options
Button Tag
Text/Paragraph <P>
Form Field <Form>
Heading 1-6 <H1>-<H6>
Figure <Figure>
Table <Table>, <TR>, <TH>, and <TD>
Cell <TD>
Formula <Formula>
Background/Artifact [Removes the tag and converts the item to an artifact]

Page content groups

By default, when the Reading Order tool is opened, the "Show page content groups" checkbox is checked.

And the "Page content order" option is selected.

Each tagged item in the document is surrounded by a gray box called a "region." Each region has a label on its top-left corner with a number that indicates the item’s content order on the page.