Accessible PDF Files

Speaker: This video will cover how to run an accessibility check on a PDF document.

To run an accessibility check, you'll need to have Adobe Acrobat installed. Adobe Reader, or built-in browser PDF readers will not have accessibility checking or remediation abilities. So if you need an Adobe Acrobat license, you can learn more on the Software Central website at softwarecentral.wwu.edu.

Once you have Adobe Acrobat with the document you're working on open, you'll want to select the Prepare for Accessibility tool. When we open that, we will choose the Check for Accessibility option, which then opens a dialogue of options for running a check.

You can create an accessibility report if you want to share results out. You can select the page ranges in the document that you want, either all of them or a specific subset. You can also choose different types of issues to run such as page content, forms and tables, or alternate text and headings. I suggest by default running all of the checks, so 32 out of 32 issues , so that there aren't any possible issues missed due to a check not running.

Once you have all of your settings enabled, you can select Start Checking and that will reveal in the checker panel what kinds of issues are in the document and what category they fall into.

Speaker: This video will cover the title accessibility flag, which is a common issue found by Adobe's accessibility checker,and how to fix that issue. 

Once you've ran an accessibility check on the document, the first category of issues listed is document. In this PDF, we see the title issue is flagged as an error which is noted by the X in a red circle. If you aren't sure why this is an issue or what it really means, if we right click, we can have Adobe explain the issue which will take us to their explanation and how to actually fix it. 

With the title flag, the easiest way to fix this particular issue is to "fix." So the issue here being, first of all, that it doesn't even have a title, so we don't want to then leave it as is. We will deselect that option and we will provide a more detailed title that is descriptive of the content. So we will just go ahead and borrow the title in the main page content, which is "Project Descriptions." 

And we can already see that the title issue in the accessibility checker has now been passed.

Speaker: This video will cover the headings accessibility issue in PDF and how to fix the appropriate nesting error in the document.

When we run the accessibility check on this document, we see the headings category is flagged, and under the details specifically, the appropriate nesting issue has failed. This usually means either heading levels are skipped somewhere in the document, or the document doesn't start with a level 1 heading as expected.

You can find where those affected elements are by selecting each one. Sometimes it doesn't show up, so to reveal it you can right click and show in the tags panel, which will then highlight the specific element as well as its related tag.

So going back to the first element, if we go to the tags panel again, we can see the reason it flagged was because the title is a heading level 1 tag, and the executive summary is a heading Level 3 tag. Since heading levels should only decrease by one level at a time, the executive summary heading should really be set to a level 2 heading and not a Level 3 heading.

There are a few ways to fix this in the PDF. For this particular example, if we choose the related tag and go to its properties, we can then choose the type of tag here. Instead of heading Level 3, opening the drop down, we can then choose heading level 2 and close, which should update the tag to a heading level 2.

Going back to the second element affected, we can then go back to the tags panel and for this one specifically, it looks like the previous heading was a heading level 2, "Partnering Around Mutual Benefit," and then the next heading was a heading level 4, which if this is a subsection should be a heading Level 3. For this one, if we double click, we should be able to go into a tag editor mode, and we can erase the "4" and type in an "H3" to indicate that it should be a heading level 3.

We will finally address the 3rd element, showing this in the tag panel that this is an H3 and there is a skip because it goes from H1 to H3. Since this is a section of the content, and not the title of the content, this should probably be set to a heading level 2. So I'll just go ahead and click into that again, and type H2 for the tag, which then should resolve the skip because now a heading level 2 is going down to a Level 3, which is decreasing by one level.

In the accessibility checker, if we then check again, we should now see the appropriate nesting flag has resolved.

Speaker: In this video we'll cover the alternate text issue flag, specifically figures needing alternative text.

So after running the accessibility check on this PDF, we can see that there is one issue flagged under Alternate text. If we go into detail, we can see there are three figures that are missing some kind of alt text. Selecting a specific figure should show us where in the content these images are and which ones need to be fixed.

We can start to add alt text by selecting the first image and choosing "fix." Currently we're on image one of three, so we will go ahead and add some quick alt text that describes the content in the chart.

Once that's added, we can go to image two and do something similar for this other road map chart.

Finally, we can choose the next arrow again to go to image 3. And this image is a little more decorative in nature. We already have the content of the image in the sentence following it, talking about solar panels and green fields. Since the purpose of this image is a little more decorative than meaningful, we'll leave the text field empty but choose "Decorative figure," and now we can select Save and close. If you do this too early, it will just save the entire dialog and you might end up missing all text on some images. So make sure to save and close after all images in the sequence have alt text or are marked decorative.

And we can see now that under the alternate text issue that the figures needing alternate text have been passed.

Speaker: This video will discuss how and why to address the reading order check.

When running an accessibility check on a PDF, The results show a manual check under the document category for logical reading order. This will always flag in the results for human review. Reading order may depend or change based on the document's layout and design, such as if it has multiple columns or maybe imagery. So Acrobat can't automatically determine that the order is correct, and it needs a human to verify.

Also keep in mind that even if your document is accurately tagged in the Tags panel, verifying reading order is still important because some text to speech tools like Acrobat's built in Read Aloud still look to the reading order instead of the Tags panel. So making sure your document is both tagged and the reading order is set should support a wider audience of readers.

To check the reading order, we can use the Reading order option here in the right panel now highlighted, which is near the checker results option. So, we can see blocks of text in the document identified by numbers in the page. A logical sequence for this page would likely be read from top down.

For block one, we can see that is at the very top and block 2, 3, and 4 follow. But it looks like we have now skipped the image and have gone to block 5. That doesn't make sense given how the image is part of the first section of the content. And we can also see that even though it's correctly tagged in the page structure as we would expect, in the reading order it's not correct and gets skipped.

To fix this issue, in the reading order panel, we can drag item 8, which is the image, and we will drag that up between items 4 and 5. So now we see the image block is now between the two text blocks 4 and 6. If we go down, now it is highlighting as expected, which means the reading order should make sense.