How to make PDFs accessible for everyone | Step by step guide

Discover how to create, refine, and share PDFs that truly anyone can use.

To make PDFs accessible means to meet a legal and ethical standard, ensuring everyone, including those with disabilities, can access the information. This guide on how to make PDFs accessible walks you through just that—from optimising source documents to testing finished PDFs for compliance.

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Starting with an accessible document
Optimising existing PDFs for accessibility
Enhancing images, graphics, and tables
Testing and validating PDF accessibility
Best practices for sharing accessible PDFs
Frequently asked questions

PDFs are everywhere. They have been used by organisations to store important information for a long time, but unfortunately, a large number were not created with accessibility in mind.

If you cannot replace PDFs with a HTML alternative, you should aim to make all of your PDFs accessible for the following reasons:

Accessible PDFs are inclusive and allow anyone to access, view and interact with the content in the document, including users who rely upon assistive technology. Accessible PDFs are imporant because they create a better user experience for all.

In contrast, inaccessible PDFs cannot be accessed by assistive technology. PDFs that have not been created accessibly can be frustrating and impossible for disabled users to access, leaving them without the information they need.

Creating accessible PDFs is not just about inclusivity, there are also legal implications for both public and private sector organisations. Non-compliance with accessibility standards in PDFs could lead to a breach of legislation, including the Equality Act 2010.

Accessible PDFs are legally compliant PDFs.

Another cornerstone of accessible PDFs is searchable text. When you create a PDF, you might not realise the importance of making the text searchable. But for assistive technology, it’s a game-changer. Search functionality enables accessibility assistants to interpret and retrieve words, which is absent in text displayed as images or in non-searchable file formats.

Before your source document becomes a PDF file, it has a life of its own, and it should be created with accessibility in mind. This approach facilitates smoother and more effective process for PDF accessibility at a later stage, starting with a well-structured document title. Ensuring your document is PDF accessible from the beginning will save time and effort in the long run.

This section will outline specific strategies to create accessible documents across platforms such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs, and Adobe InDesign.

Microsoft Word is a widely used tool for document creation and an effective one for creating accessible documents. One of its most valuable features is the Accessibility Checker. This tool verifies that the document is easily accessed and edited by individuals of all abilities, making the content accessible to users with disabilities.

When it comes to exporting an accessible PDF from Word, the process is straightforward. It involves the following steps:

1. Run the Accessibility Checker.
2. Select the File button.
3. Choose Save As.
4. Ensure that the ‘Document structure tags for accessibility’ checkbox is selected in the dialog box.
5. Save the document as a PDF.

By following these steps, you can ensure that the PDF will have the necessary tags for accessibility.

Google Docs is another popular platform for creating documents. To check if you have created an accessible document, you can download add ons from the Google workspace marketplace that will review your content.

Alternatively, you can follow our checklist for creating accessible PDFs, as a helpful reminder of what to include to make your documents accessible. For example, reminders to add alt text to images within the document.

Adobe InDesign also enables the creation of accessible PDFs. These include maintaining consistent use of paragraph styles across the document and establishing export tag relationships between InDesign styles.

To ensure the PDF exported from Adobe InDesign is accessible, follow these steps:

1. Choosing the Export Tagging tab and setting the PDF tag to represent the style being created.
2. Selecting the Create Tagged PDF option in the Export dialog box.
3. Using the ‘Use Structure for Tab Order’ option.

By following these steps, you can create accessible PDF documents that are accessible to all users.

While creating accessible documents from scratch is essential, optimising existing PDFs for accessibility holds equal significance. We will explore several strategies to enhance the accessibility of scanned documents, interactive forms, and tagged content.

Scanned documents can pose a unique set of challenges when it comes to accessibility. Enter Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This technology transforms the text in scanned images into selectable and searchable text, making the content accessible to screen readers and other assistive technologies.

The process of OCR involves scanning an image of text, recognizing individual characters, and transforming them into a machine-readable text format. To enhance its functionality for accessibility, it is recommended to begin with a high-quality scan, ensure suitable contrast, and review and amend the OCR output for precision.

Given that interactive forms are a prevalent feature in PDFs, ensuring their accessibility is imperative for a smooth user experience. The accessibility of form fields is guaranteed by correctly tagging them within the document. This process ensures that all form fields are integrated into the document’s structure, making them accessible to assistive technologies.

Assigning a logical tab order in interactive PDF forms enables users of assistive technology to navigate from one form field to the next using the Tab key, ensuring a sensible and efficient experience for them. This feature facilitates smooth interaction with the form and improves accessibility for all users.

Tagging plays a vital role in PDF accessibility. This is because it:

• Guarantees compatibility with assistive technology
• Provides additional information about the document, for example the author, title and keywords.
• Defines the accurate reading order with a logical heading structure.
• Ensures accessibility of the content to all users, including those with disabilities.

Tagging annotations is essential to incorporate them into the Tags tree or designate them as artefacts, which is vital for enabling screen readers to accurately interpret the content.

Following a logical reading order enhances the accessibility of tables in a PDF by maintaining the connections between rows and columns, enabling screen readers and assistive technologies to navigate and comprehend the table content with greater efficiency.

In addition to tagging, PDF metadata provides extra information about a PDF document. Metadata provides context about a PDF document, such as the title, who wrote it, and when. Using Insytful, you can identify all PDFs on your website with missing PDF metadata.

While text is a major component of PDFs, images, graphics, and tables also significantly contribute to the overall content. Ensuring their accessibility is critical for a complete and inclusive reading experience, especially for screen reader users.

We will now discuss how to improve these elements for better accessibility.

Alt text is a critical component in the accessibility toolkit. It serves as a textual alternative to non-text elements in digital content. Its importance lies in conveying this context to individuals with disabilities, particularly those utilising screen readers.

Alternate text offers an alternative portrayal for diverse non-text elements in PDFs, such as multimedia, annotations, and 3D models, thereby ensuring accessibility for individuals with disabilities. WCAG section 1.1.1 explicitly deals with non-text content and requires that all images, graphics, and other non-text elements have text alternatives that fulfil the same purpose.

Colour contrast holds great significance in PDF accessibility. It guarantees readability for users with visual impairments, including individuals with colour blindness. The prescribed colour contrast ratio for text and images in accessible PDFs is a minimum of 4.5:1, except for large-scale text which should have a contrast ratio of at least 3:1.

There are tools like Adobe Acrobat’s built-in Accessibility Checker or third-party options such as Colour Contrast and Deque Color Contrast Analyzer that can evaluate colour contrast in PDFs to ensure they adhere to accessibility standards. Correcting contrast issues in Acrobat Pro can be done using the ‘Replace Document Colours’ feature and selecting ‘Use High-Contrast Colours’.

Tables can effectively present complex information in a concise manner. However, the complexity of table structures can pose challenges for accessibility. Proper tagging in creating accessible table structures in PDFs significantly enhances the interpretation and reading of the document by screen readers and other assistive technologies.

A logical reading order enhances the accessibility of tables in a PDF by maintaining the connections between rows and columns. This enables screen readers and assistive technologies to navigate and comprehend the table content with greater efficiency.

Despite the meticulous process involved in creating accessible PDFs, the task does not end there. It’s equally crucial to test and validate these documents for accessibility, ensuring that they are indeed accessible to all.

We will examine some of the methods and tools available to achieve this.

Adobe Acrobat Pro comes equipped with a built-in accessibility checker, a powerful tool that scans your PDFs for accessibility issues. The tool validates whether a PDF document adheres to accessibility standards, such as PDF/UA and WCAG 2.0.

Interpreting the results of the Adobe Acrobat Pro Accessibility Checker is also straightforward. The tool assists in identifying areas that may not adhere to accessibility standards, such as lacking alternative text for images or improper heading structure. It also provides a summary of the results in the form of an Accessibility Report, offering links to tools and documentation that can help in addressing any identified issues.

Beyond Adobe Acrobat Pro, numerous third-party accessibility tools can assist in testing and validating PDF accessibility. These tools offer supplementary capabilities for testing and guaranteeing that PDFs adhere to diverse accessibility standards.

Starting with Insytful, which scans your whole website, including web pages, PDFs and documents, looking for accessibility issues. Insytful scores the accessibility of your PDFs, checking for accessible headings, lists and tables to name a few. The checks highlight opportunities to improve the accessibility of your web content, and what manual changes need to be made.

Other notable examples of third-party accessibility tools include PDFix Desktop Lite and PDFix Desktop Pro, as well as PAC which checks the compliance with PDF Universal Accessibility (PDF UA). These tools pinpoint potential issues that may go unnoticed by standard accessibility checkers and provide advanced capabilities for addressing and documenting these issues.

After creating and validating your accessible PDF, the final stage involves sharing it. However, sharing accessible PDFs entails more than just sending a file. It’s about ensuring that the document remains accessible to all, regardless of how, when, or where it’s accessed.

Best practices for sharing accessible PDFs include:

• Ensuring images have informative Alt tags
• Utilising correct tab order
• Providing alternative descriptions
• Making text selectable
• Employing headings and subheadings for clear content structure
• Using descriptive links

Apart from pdf files, there are alternative formats that offer accessibility, such as HTML, OOXML, EPUB3, accessible web pages, and accessible Word documents, but the pdf format remains widely used.

We’ve traversed the landscape of PDF accessibility, from understanding its importance to learning how to create, optimise, enhance, and validate accessible PDFs.

Remember, accessibility isn’t just a checklist; it’s an ongoing commitment to inclusivity. So, let’s take this knowledge and use it to make the digital world a more accessible place for everyone.

To convert a PDF to an accessible document, consider accessibility before converting, add fillable form fields and descriptions, set the tab order, add other accessibility features, tag the PDF, and evaluate and repair tagging problems. This will help make the PDF accessible for all users.

To allow access to a PDF, go to File, select Document Properties, and then choose the Security tab. From there, you can add security and choose the specific options for access.

To make PDFs accessible, convert non-selectable text to selectable text, add tags to indicate heading structure, tag the content correctly for interpretability by assistive technologies, and retain tags and accessibility formatting when converting the document to PDF. This is essential for ensuring readability and navigation for those using assistive technologies.

To make a PDF link accessible to everyone, use the Make Accessible action in Adobe Acrobat Pro or run the Accessibility Checker before generating or saving the document as a PDF in Microsoft 365.

To make your Microsoft Word documents accessible, use the Accessibility Checker to ensure easy access for individuals of all abilities. When exporting as a PDF, make sure to select the 'Document structure tags for accessibility' checkbox.