Basic PDF Accessibility Remediation Demonstration

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

EMILY LAPAYOWKER:
This is a demonstration of how to use Adobe Acrobat Pro to remediate a PDF for accessibility.

So, the first thing you're going to want to do is check on your document properties. Open menu, scroll down to document properties. And you want to check and make sure (A) that you have a title and (B) that it accurately represents the content of the document. So, here it looks like it does. We have an author already listed. Let's put in a subject of funding and keyword, “OD2A.” These can just help people locate your document and files.

The last thing you're going to want to do is click on the advanced tab. It's probably the furthest right. And you're going to want to check under reading options to make sure the language selected is the same as the language in which the document is written. [clears throat] In this case, it is, which is important because that's how screen readers determine which language they use to read through your document. So, we're in good shape. If we weren't, we would just choose from the drop down.

Okay. So, we're going to hit okay here.

And then we're going to run an accessibility checker just to see what the status of the document is now at the time that we're starting. So, we're going to go to “all tools.” You may have to hit view more to get to “prepare for accessibility.” And once you've opened that menu, you will choose “check for accessibility.”

Right? So we are going to start checking. And it appears very quickly in a pane on the right side. And it looks like it's in good shape. Right? You see appropriate nesting for headings, page content, everything's passed. You see our document has two issues. One is logical reading order, the other is color contrast. Both of these need a manual check because the checker can't do it for you. I know in this case that we are using a large enough color contrast to meet the accessibility threshold. So I'm going to manually pass this by right-clicking on it and hitting “pass.”

Logical reading order. We wouldn't be able to manually pass until the end.

We're also going to check what the problem in alternate text is. And you can see figures don't have alternate text. Let's click on this. You see this one got a little bit darker. That means that it's referring to these, these decorative lines. And because they're decorative, they're never going to have alt text. Instead, when we get to the reading order, we're going to mark them as an artifact or background, which will remove them from the reading order entirely.

But so far, this is looking pretty promising. Unfortunately or fortunately, we're going to have to check the checker. It doesn't know what we know. So, we're going to have to make sure that what we're seeing in these results reflects reality. So, we're going to go over to the little tag icon and click on that.

And we can see why it's important to check the checker. Everything is listed in the document, which is good. But we can see that there are no headers. So, they're nested correctly because they don't exist, right? So, we're going to have to go through and we're going to have to make some changes.

Uh, the first thing we're going to want to do is choose an H1. We're going to have to title this document. And to me, these first three lines of text look good. So, we click and we can see that there's actually an empty P tag in here. That is a known error. It happens when you convert from Word to an Adobe PDF. There's really nothing you can do about it except take it out. So, right-click, delete. Now, we can see we have these three lines of text in a row, but they're still not together.

So, we're going to open them up. We're going to take the second line and drag it so it's part of the first tag. Same for the text in the third. Going to get rid of these empty P tags. You can delete them all at once using delete empty tags. We're going to delete them manually here.

Now, you've got all three of these lines together, but they're still not an H1. So, we're going to click on the P tag and we're going to right-click and go to properties. Once you're in properties, you're going to select heading level one. Everything in this dropown is listed alphabetically, which makes it easy to find. And now we have our three-line H1, which is great.

Have another empty P tag here. Uh the next line is about the application deadline. You can see there are actually two little boxes. When you open it up, you can see why. One is the path. Path just means that there's some sort of style attached to this particular tag. In this case, it's going to be that yellow highlighting. You can leave those there. They don't have any kind of negative impact on the screen reader's ability to navigate the PDF. So, we're going to leave it in place. Delete the tag. Project summary looks like it should be in H2. So, we're going to change that. We're going to right-click, go to properties, scroll up to H2, and close.

Now, we're at that figure. Now, we're not going to touch this. We're going to ignore them while we're going through the tag structure because we're going to delete it, as I said, when we get to our reading order.

So, let's say a tag is missing. Uh in this case, we'll say it's really important to structurally identify the entire project summary as a distinct section. Okay, we're going to go through, we're going to delete these empty ones and then I'm going to show you how to add the new tag and how to nest them.

All right, so I'm going to click roughly where you want the new tag to show up. Click on the three dots at the top of the pane and then hit new tag. You'll see it'll let you select what type of tag. Since we are talking about a section, we're going to scroll down to section.

So, you can see now we have a section that appears between the application deadline and the H2 project summary. To get the project summary into this new section, we're going to click on it and we're going to drag it. And we're going to do that for everything that shows up or that should show up in the section. And you can see from the length of the underline where in the structure this would get added. We want to keep these all on the same line.

Okay. So that's we've got everything in the section. Now you click on it. You can see it's the entire project summary. We're only going to do that for this one. It's really just for the purposes of the demonstration. The other thing I wanted to call your attention to is the fact that this has a link. You can see that the link is on the correct text. And it looks like we've also got an [clears throat] empty line here. So, we're just going to delete that. Perfect. It's probably just an extra space at the end.

Now, this is another H2.

Again, a figure that we're just going to ignore for now. And you know, it's a a time-consuming process to go through these. Fortunately, this one's pretty simple. It's just a lot of extra little breaks here.

Right. So, now we've gotten to our first list. We can see that everything is highlighted in the overarching list tag, which is great. That means that there's nothing that's been left out. Uh if you open each of the list items, you'll see that there's a little label, which is in this case a bullet, and there's also the body of text. Again, you can drag and drop to move things around if somehow they got out of order or were accidentally split across uh ,you know, lines into new sections. So, this, these look great, though.

Going to continue on.

Now, this looks like it could be an H3. We're going to make it one. If you're not the one who wrote the original document, it can be hard to know if, if you're choosing the right thing, but it's a judgment call. And, and that looked plausible. So, delete this.

And now we're at our first table. You'll notice we have a header row, which is always important to make sure there is always a header row and that it is all correctly defined. Now, we're going to open the body, which is everything below the header row. Of course, if we open this first row, we'll see that the first cell making up the first column in each of these rows is actually also listed as a header. Now, that might be appropriate for the content. Um, in this case, we're going to change them. We're going to change them to data cells instead of header cells, just for the purposes of demonstration. So we go to properties and right above it, table data cell. We're going to want to make sure these match. So we're going to go through all of them.

And if you decide later that it was a mistake, it's, as you can see, very easy to move it back. Just go back into the properties.

But the most important thing is consistency. Uh, you'll also notice in this final one, the last cell is empty. Generally speaking, you're going to want to avoid empty cells if possible. It might not be possible. just try to keep them to a minimum. Um, the other things you're going to want to avoid are merged cells or using tables explicitly for the purposes of styling. Right? This is real data content for this table. Try to avoid using tables just for styling purposes.

So, we're going through we're, we're getting close to the end of this document. We're going to make this an H2, and the figure that we're ignoring. Now, something that's important to keep in mind is that undo doesn't always work when you're doing this. So, we're actually just going to go ahead and save it right now. It's something you should do often because again if, if you're saving as you go, it's a lot easier to not lose work if something goes wrong.

Right? You can see that we have a whole bunch of boxes within this P tag. Some of it is styling, some of it is links. All of it looks okay. So, we are going to continue on and delete.

We can actually…Yeah, let's make this one an H3. Why not?

We have our list and everything in here. Looks fine. I'm going to delete the empty tag.

H3 and then finally we have our, our last paragraph. So everything here in the tagging order looks fine. I one of the important things to remember is that you should fix your tags before you tackle the reading order. So we fixed our tags. Now we're going to the reading order. And as you may have guessed from the name, this is the order in which a screen reader will read your document.

Now remember those figures, those lines that didn't have any value beyond decoration. We can see them here as 10 and 11. This is another error. Adobe tends to move images to the bottom of a page um when it makes the conversion. Let's say we were going to keep it. We want it under project summary, right? So, we would drag this up to being under six.

So, now it's been renamed. It's seven because it will update dynamically, which is great. But actually, we're getting rid of it anyway. So, we clicked on it. You want to right-click and then you want to tag as background artifact. Do the same thing here to the other one.

So, you can see that the reading order now looks pretty good. Uh, we do have this number three and the number three is blank. Now, we deleted it from the tags. That doesn't always remove it from the reading order. I'm not sure why. So, we're going to try to get rid of it. It's not always possible. Some of these just stick around and create problems.

So, let's try to tag it as background artifact first. That did not work. So let's instead try I'm going to right click again and delete selected item structure, which also did not work. So, this is just something that we are going to have to live with in the document. It's not ideal, but it is the way it goes.

Each of these pages are broken up on their own which makes it a lot easier to go through. Now you can see one, two, three, four. And now we're at the third and final page. We have that decorative line. So, we're going to mark it as an artifact.

So, one, two, we have another, another blank three. Let's see if we can get rid of it. We cannot. Uh, so it's, it's just going to be there. So we have four, five, six, seven, and seven will take us through all of these. Let's see if we can get rid of eight also. No. Okay. And then nine and 10. So now we've gone through the reading order.

You've seen how to remove some things from the reading order, but for unclear reasons, not everything.

This is a pretty good looking document. It's ready. It's ready for a screen reader. Um, so we're going to close out. We're going to want to save it.

And you should be good to go.