Adobe Acrobat Accessibility Checker

Preparing your Document

1. Open your PDF using Adobe Acrobat.
2. Access Document properties from the Menu.
3. Set the Title and  Author fields on the Description tab.

4. On the Initial View tab, set the Show dropdown field to Document Title.

5. Click OK.

Finding the Accessibility Menu

1. Open the All tools menu.
2. Click on the Prepare for accessibility option. You may need to click on View more to locate it.

Preparing and Running the Accessibility Report

1. Click Automatically tag PDF. If a popup message indicates the document has already been tagged, press Cancel.
2. Click Check for accessibility to create the accessibility report.
   1. There are several categories in the Checking Options section of the popup.
   2. Ensure that all boxes in each category are checked.
   3. Press the Start Checking button.
3. Click Open accessibility report.

Using the Accessibility Report

• Review the Summary section of the report to determine if the checker found any problems in the document.

• Review the Detailed Report.

• The Status column indicates whether a specific accessibility item passed or failed the check.
• The Rule Name column includes links to instructions on how to address that specific accessibility issue.
  • Many of the instructions involve using the Accessibility Checker.
  • The Accessibility Checker can be accessed by clicking the person with the checkmark icon to the right of the report.

Using the Accessibility Checker

1. Review the category titles, looking for an issues label.
2. Click on the > sign to see all the items within a category.
   1. Any item with Passed at the end can be ignored.
   2. Any item with Needs manual check can't be evaluated by the checker, so you must do it.
   3. Any item with Failed needs to be addressed.
3. Right click on any item that failed the checker.
4. Click on Fix.
5. Follow the instructions on how to fix the issue.
6. Press OK.
7. Save the changes made to the file.

Use the Read Out Loud Feature

1. Open the Menu.
2. Select View, then Read out loud, and finally Activate Read Out Loud.
3. Ensure that your volume is loud enough to hear the screen reader.
4. Access the last menu you were in and select either Read this page only or Read to end document.
5. You can pause or stop the screen reader playback at any time from the same menu.

6. The reading order can be changed by clicking on the Fix reading order option from the Prepare for accessibility menu.

Additional Resources: