Creating Accessible PDF's Using Adobe Acrobat Pro
Creating Accessible PDF's Using Adobe Acrobat Pro
It is important for faculty to learn the steps to create accessible PDF’s. This ensures students with vision
or reading impairments who rely on text-to-speech software access to course readings. Software
programs such as Adobe Acrobat/Professional have Optical Character Recognition (OCR) capabilities to
create an accessible PDF. Adobe Acrobat Professional is capable of converting many different types of
files into an accessible PDF. If you have a document scanned as a GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, or Microsoft
Office file, any of these can be made accessible for your students (Free trials of this program are
available online. Ask IT if you have this available on your campus).
Click the yellow file button at the top to open the file
5. Other information:
Keep in mind that if the original scan is of poor quality, the OCR programs will not be able to decipher
the words and the document will not be read aloud correctly.
Some, though not all, PDFs downloaded from online databases, journals, or publishers may already be in
an accessible format. Test the file by following the steps above, “How to Test PDF’s Accessibility”. If the
document can be read aloud, you may not have to run an OCR scan.
For further information please go to the Adobe Pro Version X –accessibility info Link:
http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat/training.html#10