Good Practice

Use Acrobat's Built-in Checker to assess your PDF's accessibility and then do a final check of the reading order.

Directions

Open the document in Adobe Acrobat.
Open the Edit menu then select Manage Tools.
Add then open the Accessibility tool.
Open the Accessibility tool and Full Check (PC) or Accessibility Check (Mac).
In the report (left sidebar), expand a category then right-click on an issue to utilize resources for fixing the issue.
Recheck the reading order.
1. Open the File menu.
2. Hover on Export to.
3. Select Text (Accessible).
4. Review the .txt file to determine that the document has appropriate reading order for screen reader users.
Save the file.

If you are willing to go even deeper in PDF accessibility, consider using the following:

You can run these checks at the beginning of your remediation process as well. We've simply chosen to stick it at near the end of this guide because we don't want authors to rely solely on the accessibility checker to catch their mistakes. Checkers can only catch about a third of issues so it is important to do manual checking too. We also decided to stick this step near the end because the checker results aren't always easy to understand and we felt that walking you through the process of correcting many of the issues would reduce the number of questions the checker raises.

Last Updated Fall 2020