Evaluating PDF Accessibility

This lesson will cover how to use Adobe Acrobat Pro DC to evaluate how accessible a document is and how to convert a scanned document into a document that is a little more accessible.  

You have a choice as to how to engage with the material in this lesson. Remember, the key concepts are always addressed in the text. If you need more info or learn by watching, the videos and resources are great supplements.

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Accessibility Check

Under the Accessibility Tool in Acrobat, you can run a full check on your document in order to see what errors/issues Acrobat flags. The finished report will help you identify potential issues and, in some cases, will help you to fix issues from the report itself. To run the checker, follow the steps below.

1. Go to and select Tools in the Acrobat menu. 
2. Scroll down to Accessibility (or type accessibility in the tool search bar).
3. Select Accessibility - the Accessibility Tool pane should open on the right side of the window.
4. Select Full Check. Make sure the document format is selected if you are checking a standard text document. Make sure all of the accessibility features are selected for a thorough check. 
5. Once the check has been completed, you will see if particular components were flagged with issues in the Accessibility Checker navigation pane. Expand these areas to drill down to the flagged components. Right click to learn more about the issue or fix the problem. 

Check Read Order

The Order navigation pane will allow you to check the read order of your document. Sections will be represented in grey boxes and numbered so that you can quickly scan the document and see the order in which items are read.

To open the Order pane go to View > Show/Hide > Navigation Panes > Order

If the order is incorrect, you can reorder the items by clicking on the item, then dragging and dropping it to a new location in the list. (You can also use copy and paste to do this if drag and drop is not possible.)

Note: If no items are shown in the Order pane, you will need to use the Touch Up Read Order tool to add sections and define the read order. This will be covered on the next page. 

Check Document Tags

In PDFs, tags are used to identify how the document has been formatted. Tags are very much like HTML markup. They show which text has been marked as a heading, list, table row header, image, etc. When converting a Word document to a PDF the default is to use the heading structure to tag the document. This is a great approach. However, if you did not create the document or if the document is scanned, you'll want to check how the document has been tagged and if the tags are accurate. Follow the steps below to check the document tags.

1. Open the tags navigation panel (View > Show/Hide > Navigation Panes > Tags)
2. In the options menu at the top of the Tags pane, make sure Highlight Content is selected so that as you click through the pane, you can see which items are associated with each tag in order to verify if the tags are accurate.

Ideally, the tags will be in a logical and hierarchical sequence, as discussed in Accessible Design Principles.

Headings will show as the following tags: <H1>, <H2>, <H3>, and so forth.

Images should be tagged with the <Figure> tag. 

Lists should be tagged as <L>.

Tables are tagged as <Table>.

To check how a specific content item is tagged, you can select the item/text, then select "Find tag from selection" to be taken to the item's tag. 

Checking PDF for Accessibility (8:38)

A short video showing how to use the Accessibility Checker, Order, and Tags panes to check how accessible a PDF is. Compares a PDF created in Word and a scanned PDF that has been "made accessible" using Acrobat's action wizard.

Discovering if a PDF is currently accessible (1:44)

A short video using the Accessibility Check in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.

• Adobe Acrobat User Guide: Check Accessibility of PDFs Links to an external site.