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Although the HHS says that PDFs do not need to be 508 compliant if a compliant HTML version of the document exists, it is a good idea to get in the practice of taking as many steps as you can to improve your PDF document's accessibility.
Table 1.3 The following table explains how to create an accessible PDF once your document is in Acrobat.Table 1.3 explains how to create an accessible PDF once your source file is in Acrobat.
Note: Refer to the HHS checklist for accessible PDFs for helpful tips.
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Characteristic of Accessible PDFs | How This Applies To CBIIT | ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searchable text | Do not scan documents to create a PDF. This converts all text to an image that a screen reader cannot scan. | ||||||
Fonts that allow characters to be extracted to text | Make sure we only use fonts that can be extracted to Unicode characters. Use Adobe Acrobat 9 rather than 7, which does not support Unicode. | ||||||
Interactive form fields | We do not use form fields. | ||||||
Other interactive features: buttons, hyperlinks, and navigational aids | We already use links, bookmarks, headings, and a TOC, so we are covered here. | ||||||
| We cannot specify the document language from FrameMaker or Word so we must do so in the final PDF. To specify the document language, do the following.
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Security that will not interfere with assistive technology | We should not set any security restrictions on our PDF files. We do not currently do so. The text of an accessible PDF must be available to a screen reader. | ||||||
Document structure tags and proper read order | When we create a tagged PDF, the structure of our source document creates the appropriate document structure tags. However, it appears that not all elements in our source files result in correctly structured tags. The Acrobat Accessibility Checker identifies these tags and it will be a learning process for all of us how many tags we need to fix. | ||||||
Alternative text descriptions | We must do this in our source files. |
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- Specify the document language as explained in Table 2.1 here.
- Run the Adobe Acrobat Accessibility Full Check, as follows.
- Select Advanced > Accessibility > Full Check. The Accessibility Full Check dialog box appears.
- Accept the default options, which include the Adobe PDF checking option.
- Click Start Checking. In the resulting report, follow the instructions Acrobat provides for finding and correcting accessibility errors.
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