Adobe Acrobat

Many websites provide important information in PDF documents but they are often not accessible, which means that readers with disabilities miss the information. Most PDFs can be made accessible in a small number of steps that will seem familiar if you have created accessible HTML.

Have you heard of PDF/UA?  It is a complementary set of guidelines to the WCAG 2.0 success criteria and is a technical standard that provides a consistent means for achieving accessible PDF documents.  Recently the AIIM published a mapping, Achieving WCAG 2.0 with PDF/UA, to help people understand the alignment between the two sets of guidelines. 

PDF documents can present some special problems for accessibility but a variety of techniques are available, either in the original authoring tool or in Adobe tools, for ensuring accessibility.

A document that passes the Adobe full accessibility check could still be difficult for a person with disabilities to use and might not meet accessibility guidelines and best practices. Interactive Accessibility goes beyond the automated check to look at the following:

Have you been told that you must make a PDF document accessible? Assuming that you are either an old hand at this process or have now learned what it means for a PDF to be accessible, you now face the task of actually doing the tags work in Acrobat. If you have done this before with any PDF of more than a few pages you know that it involves developing a process and then settling in for a fun time of clicking, typing, and dragging.