One tool used to create accessible PDF’s is Adobe Acrobat  not Adobe Reader. Adobe Reader does not have the tools needed to make the changes to your PDF. Fleming College employees have access to Adobe Acrobat through the Adobe Creative Cloud. Some students have access through their chosen course while other students need to purchase a monthly student subscription from Adobe.

Acrobat accessibility tools

Once Acrobat is installed, important 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 and the group of “Prepare for accessibility” tools must be added to the Tools Pane.

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 > Side panels.

Tags

Within the Accessibility tags pane, you may view, reorder, rename, modify, delete, and create tags. Document tags are needed to tell screen readers and other assistive technology how to interpret the content’s format and determine the reading order of the page’s content.

Add tags to an untagged document

If your document is untagged (e.g. a Word document not saved as a PDF properly), tags may be added to an untagged document, under Prepare for accessibility in the Tools pane, select Automatically tag PDF.

Order Panel

The Order panel allows you to change the reading order of the content on the page so it matches the visual reading order. To open the Order panel,  right-click on an empty part of the Navigation pane and select “Order” from the menu. You can also be shown from the main application menu: View > Show/Hide > Order.

The Order panel divides the document into pages and every element is ordered into the reading order. This makes changing the tags and reading order much easier by simply drag-and-drop the elements into the desired order.