PDFs are widely used to provide electronic forms of printed documents. With a little care they can be fully accessible.

Accessible PDFs

• contain text not just pictures of text
• have clickable links
• have alt-text on images
• can be read by assistive technology in the order that the author intended
• contain internal "tags" that assistive software uses to identify headings, tables and captions

There are a number of simple tools you can use to check the accessibility of existing PDFs see:

• Check PDF Accessibility using Adobe Reader

If your starting point is an accessible Word document then it is easy to generate an accessible PDF using Word.

See: Create Accessible PDFs (Microsoft)

If PDFs are badly structured, or have an incorrect reading order then these issues can be corrected using Adobe Acrobat Professional.

More Information

• Creating Accessible PDFs in Adobe Acrobat
• Purchasing Licenses for Acrobat Pro for use on campus