How to Create an Accessible PDF.

It's important to ensure that your documents can be easily accessed, read, and navigated on different devices, regardless of the intended audience. Creating an accessible PDF is crucial in making your content user-friendly for individuals with diverse abilities and disabilities. You can incorporate a variety of accessibility features to ensure your PDFs meet international accessibility standards and are easy to use.

What you’ll learn

• What accessible PDFs are and why they matter
• Tips for creating accessible PDFs
• Steps to make your PDF accessible
• Document accessibility guidelines and standards in Australia

What is an accessible pdf, and why does it matter?

An accessible PDF is a document that has been created to be easily readable by anyone with a range of physical or cognitive abilities. Accessibility features can range from ensuring your document is in an easy-to-read font, layout, and colours, right through to being able to be read by various types of assistive technology.

People who benefit from accessible PDFs.

There are a variety of reasons why people may require accessible digital documents, either on a permanent or temporary basis. For example, think about what it may be like trying to use your document with a broken arm, and what you can do to help users still use your PDF.

Accessible PDFs can be useful for everyone, but particularly anyone with permanent or changing needs and abilities such as —

• Low vision, blindness, or colour-blindness
• Mobility or motor difficulties and injuries such as repetitive strain injury (RSI)
• Hearing problems
• Age-related conditions
• Cognitive or comprehension or literacy difficulties
• Small screens on devices such as smartwatches and smartphones
• Locations where it’s harder to interact with a device, such as while commuting

Digital access and assistive technology

Accessible PDFs can be designed to work with assistive technology. Since your audience may include people whose vision, hearing, mobility, or cognition is impaired, your document must be easy to use with assistive technology like:

• Screen readers
• Text-to-speech programs
• Braille displays
• and more

Making your PDF easily accessible benefits everyone, regardless of their abilities. It should be easy to hear on a mobile device or view with a screen magnifier, and users should be able to fill it out with or without a keyboard. Accessible PDFs usually have these features.

• Document structure tags
• Navigational aids (links, headings, contents tables)
• Alternative text descriptions
• Appropriate title tags
• Document language indication
• And other accessible features

Tips for creating accessible PDFs.

There are many different types of accessibility features you can include in the design of your documents to ensure all readers can access your content.

You can select from pre-set accessibility preferences in products such as Acrobat Pro to tag your document and make sure it is as accessible as possible. There are also a few best practices to follow at the creation of your document. Some of these include —

• Document format — The overall presentation format of your document should be as uncluttered looking as possible and follow a logical order. Have appropriate spacing between paragraphs, and use numbered or bulleted lists. Use built-in heading styles, menus, and tables of content that can be read by assistive technology devices.

• Fonts — Use fonts that are easy to read. Decorative fonts can look pretty, but they’re often harder for people to read, particularly anyone with conditions such as dyslexia or attention span disorders. Also, avoid using too many special characters that may be misread by assistive technology.

• Searchable text — Make sure all text in your PDFs is searchable so that it can be read by assistive technology, such as screen readers. Any text in scanned images will not be picked up, so convert images to PDF format using optical character recognition (OCR) technology so it is formatted as text in your document and not as an image.

• Alt text — Add alternative text (alt text) descriptions to any non-text content such as images, videos and interactive form fields in your document. These give your readers a description and understanding of what you are showing in your picture, graph, or other visual elements, or an action they can take.

• Captions, transcripts, and text descriptions — If you have a video or audio in your PDF, add captions to it, transcript it, or write a text description summarizing the content.

• Colour and contrasts — Use font colours that have high contrast with the background. Dark text on a white background is easiest for most people to read, especially as they age or if they can’t distinguish between some colours.
  Don’t use colour alone or bold or italic fonts to highlight something or create a heading. This may not be recognized by someone with colour blindness, a learning disability, and some types of screen readers. Instead, use built-in heading styles and words to emphasize your point, such as “Note: Don’t use colour alone to highlight an important point”.

• Writing style — Try to write in plain English without using too many jargon words or acronyms. Remember too that writing in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS is not only informally considered “shouting”, but it can also be confused with acronyms by text readers. It is also harder to read a sentence that is written in all capital letters.

• Keyboard compatibility — PDFs are designed to be portable and read on any device from smartphones to computers. However, some people have physical limitations that make using a mouse or touchscreen difficult. Making sure your document is keyboard compatible means your users can use key commands to navigate your document.

Steps to make your PDFs accessible.

Want to know how to make PDF accessible? Here are some step-by-step instructions to get you started.

1. Know your audience. While the ultimate goal is to make your PDF accessible to as many people as possible, your readers or your industry may have specific needs. Think about what will be needed to ensure your audience can find your document, access it, and, if appropriate, interact with it.

2. Review accessibility guidelines and standards and search other relevant websites that may have resources to help with developing digital content for people with particular needs.

3. Ideally, create a document that incorporates accessibility features from the very beginning. Making an accessible document is easiest if you start with accessibility in mind from the outset. You can create documents directly in PDF or convert them to PDF from Word and other Microsoft apps.

4. Make PDFs accessible in Acrobat Pro. Go to Tools > Action Wizard and from the Actions List, click Make Accessible.
   

5. Use the Accessibility Checker in Acrobat Pro to check the PDF accessibility features you have created. Then select from the options to fix, skip, explain, and recheck your document.

6. Test your accessible document in our free Acrobat Reader that many people use. After downloading, go to Edit > Accessibility > Set Up Assistant to set accessibility preferences. Also, test your document with different users before you publish it or distribute it and get feedback on whether it is easy to use.

Accessibility guidelines and standards.

You’ll find more detailed steps and help on how to create and verify PDF accessibility in our online Adobe Acrobat user guide.

For more detailed and technical information about creating accessible digital resources, refer to the international PDF/Universal Accessibility (PDF/UA) and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

There are also great practical resources and information on creating accessible documents and digital content on the websites of the Australian Government Digital Transformation Agency and the Centre for Accessibility Australia.

Related Content.

Some other articles we’ve recently released that may help with your creation of accessible PDFs include —

• How to hear PDF files read aloud
• How to optimize PDFs for search engines
• How to create an interactive PDF