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Before you begin
We are rolling out a new, more intuitive product experience. If the screen shown here doesn’t match your product interface, switch to the help for your current experience.
Making PDFs accessible benefits all users. For instance, the document structure that allows screen readers to read a PDF aloud also enables mobile devices to display the document more effectively on small screens. Additionally, the preset tab order of an accessible PDF form makes it easier for all users, not just those with mobility impairments, to fill out the form.
Accessibility features in Acrobat and Acrobat Reader fall into two main categories: features that enhance the reading of PDF documents and features to create accessible PDFs. To create accessible PDF documents, use Acrobat, not Reader.
Acrobat Standard provides some functionality for making existing PDFs accessible. Acrobat Pro enables you to perform tasks, such as editing reading order, or editing document structure tags that are necessary to make some PDF documents and forms accessible.
For more information about accessibility features, see these resources:
Accessible PDFs have the following characteristics.
Security that doesn’t interfere with assistive software (Acrobat Pro): Some PDF authors restrict users from printing, copying, extracting, adding comments, or editing text. The text of an accessible PDF must be available to a screen reader. You can use Acrobat to ensure that security settings don’t interfere with the screen reader’s ability to convert onscreen text to speech.
For more information about PDF accessibility, see www.webaim.org/techniques/acrobat/.
PDF tags are similar in many ways to XML tags. PDF tags indicate document structure: which text is a heading, which content makes up a section, which text is a bookmark, and so on. A logical structure tree of tags represents the organizational structure of the document. Therefore, tags indicate the reading order and improve navigation, particularly for long, complex documents without changing the PDF appearance.
Assistive software determines how to present and interpret the content of the document by using the logical structure tree. Most assistive software depends on document structure tags to determine the appropriate reading order of text. Document structure tags let assistive software convey the meaning of images and other content in an alternate format, such as sound. An untagged document does not have structure information, and Acrobat must infer a structure based on the Reading Order preference setting. This situation often results in page items being read in the wrong order or not at all.
Reflowing a document for viewing on the small screen of a mobile device relies on these same document structure tags.
Acrobat usually tags PDFs during creation. To check if a PDF contains tags, go to > Document Properties. Under Description tab, check the 'Tagged PDF" value in the Advanced pane.
In Acrobat Pro, the logical structure tree appears on the Tags panel. It shows document content as page elements nested at various levels.