How to Remediate an Existing PDF Using Adobe Acrobat Pro

Full Video Tutorials

For a full tutorial on how to remediate a PDF using Adobe Acrobat Pro, we highly recommend the LinkedIn Learning course “Creating Accessible PDFs” by Chad Chelius.

This comprehensive video-based course includes:

• Understanding accessibility
• Accessibility in PDF files
• Make an existing PDF file accessible (old and new interfaces)

Accessibility Tools in Adobe Acrobat Pro

Adobe Acrobat Pro has a set of Accessibility tools available in the tools tab or tools pane. These tools include:

• Accessibility Check: This tool identifies issues that need to be addressed. Results appear in the “accessibility checker” panel. You can get similar information from the Accessibility Report tool.
• Reading Order: This tool helps you review and repair a document’s structure. You can modify structure to correctly tag your document’s content as paragraphs, headings, lists, tables, figures, form fields and artifacts.
• Accessibility Tags: This tool lets you see the tag tree of your document and change or delete tags as necessary.
• Order Panel: Use the order panel to see the order in which your content will be read aloud by screen readers, which doesn’t always match the order shown in the tag tree. Use this tool to put all content in a logical reading order.
• Set Alternate Text: This tool allows you to review or add alt text to images in your document. Images must first be tagged as figures to be able to add alt text.
• Identify Form Fields: This tool allows you to add tooltips and tags to form fields to make them accessible to people using assistive technology.

Recommended Process for Remediation

Depending on your document, you may need to do additional remediation work that is not listed here, such as remediating tables or form fields.

1. Open your document and set up your workspace to prepare for remediation.
   1. 1. Open your PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro.
      2. Under tools, open Prepare for accessibility to access all of the tools you will need to remediate the document.
2. Open the Accessibility Checker to help you track progress on remediating the document. The Accessibility Checker will flag issues as pass or fail for “errors” or “needs manual review” for items that need a person to review.
   1. Click Check for accessibility to open the Accessibility Checker.
   2. If the Accessibility Checker Options dialog box opens, we recommend using all checking options available in the Document category. You can optionally check “Create accessibility report,” but this isn’t necessary.
   3. Click Start Checking to get information about what needs to be addressed in your PDF.
   4. We recommend addressing the issues in the order listed below, but having the accessibility checker open can help you see progress throughout the remediation process.
3. Manually tag each piece of content with the appropriate tag using the Reading Order tool. If the document wasn’t set up with accessibility in mind, the automatic tagging tools will likely be incorrect and make the process more difficult rather than speed it up.
   1. Under Prepare for accessibility, click Fix reading order to open the Reading Order tool.
   2. Make sure “structure types” is selected under “show page content groups” so that you can see what tags have been applied to each piece of content.
   3. Draw a rectangle around each piece of content and then choose the appropriate label (headings level 1-6, text/paragraph, figure, table, etc.). Headings will be flagged if they are not nested hierarchically.
   4. Tag pieces of content that do not need to be read aloud to a person using a screen reader (such as decorative shapes or footer information repeated on each page) as “artifacts.”
   5. Continue this process for the entire document.
   6. You can make sure you have tagged each piece of content by going back to the Accessibility Checker and looking under “Page Content.” If “Tagged content” is marked as Failed, you can open that drop-down menu to reveal elements that are not tagged.
4. Check the reading order of your content using the Order panel.
   CAUTION: Sometimes reordering items will change the layers on the document, hiding text. You cannot undo this by using the undo shortcut (Command + Z). We highly recommend saving your progress after each page so that if you do cause an issue in your document by reordering content, you can close the document without saving and reopen your most recent saved document.
   1. Open the Order panel.
   2. Click on the first item in the Order panel, then use the down arrow on your keyboard to go through each content item in your document.
   3. If an item needs to be reordered, click the item and drag it to the appropriate place in the Order tree.
5. Check that the document is tagged correctly by reviewing the tag tree in the Accessibility Tags panel.
   1. Click the three horizontal dots to open the Accessibility Tags menu and click Delete Empty Tags.
   2. Click on the first item in the Accessibility Tags panel, then use the down arrow on your keyboard to go through each tag in your document.
   3. If an item needs to be retagged, select that tag, right-click and choose Properties. Under the Tag tab, you should be able to change the tag Type. Click close once you have made your changes.
   4. For complex documents, you may want to group content in article tags. To do this, click the three horizontal dots to open the Accessibility Tags menu and click New Tag. Choose the tag type “Article” and click Okay. You can then select all tags you want to nest inside of this article and drag them beneath the new <Art> tag.
   5. If you have to make any changes to the tag structure, you will need to review the reading order (step 4) again.
6. Set alt text for all images and figures in your document.
   1. Open the Accessibility Checker and find the Alternate Text issue.
   2. Right-click on “Figures alternate text” and click Fix. This will open a dialog box that allows you to set alt text for all pieces of content you tagged as a figure in step 3.
   3. Enter equivalent alt text for each image.
   4. Click Save and Close.
7. Set the document’s primary language.
   1. In the Accessibility Checker under Document, set the primary language by right-clicking on the “Primary language” issue and clicking Fix. A dialog box will appear in which you can choose the language (typically English) and set it for the document.
8. Set the document’s title.
   1. In the Accessibility Checker under Document, set the document title by right-clicking on the “Title” issue and clicking Fix. This will open a Description dialog box that allows you to set a document title, subject, author and keywords. Only the title field is required.
9. Set tab order.
   1. In the Accessibility Checker under Page Content, set the document tab order by right-clicking on the “Tab order” issue and clicking Fix. This will automatically make the tab order match the page structure.
10. Set bookmarks for the document.
    1. In the Accessibility Checker under Document, set bookmarks by right-clicking on the “Bookmarks” issue and clicking Fix. A dialog box will appear in which you can choose which structure elements to turn into bookmarks; typically H1 and H2 headings make good bookmarks.