Top Tips for Accessible PDFs
Benefits
PDFs that are just scanned images of book pages are not accessible, since a screen reader cannot read the words on the page. Making a document machine-readable enables:
- Screen reader users to access the content
- Users to search the contents of the PDF, and copy and paste from it
Tips
Create Accessible PDFs from Microsoft Word Documents or PowerPoint
- Follow steps for creating an accessible document using Word or PowerPoint
- Save as an Adobe PDF
- Identify the document language
- Use the Touchup Reading Order feature
Create Accessible PDFs from Scanned Documents
This requires Adobe Acrobat X Pro, which is available on staff computers maintained by HCC IT
- Use Adobe Acrobat Pro to automatically OCR scanned documents. OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, will convert the image into text that is machine-readable and searchable.
