Adobe® Acrobat® 8 PDF Bible

Chapter 25. Accessibility and Tagged PDF Files

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Making documents accessible

• Working with tags

• Changing views for accessible documents

Adobe Acrobat 8 is compliant with United States federal code regulating document accessibility for vision- and motion-challenged persons. This means that screen readers can intelligently interpret the PDFs you create; in other words, PDF files can be read aloud in a reading order as a sighted person would read a document. Through an extensive set of keyboard shortcuts available in Acrobat, almost anyone with vision or motion challenges can share your documents and read them.

In order for a document to be accessible, you must use authoring applications capable of delivering a document's structure to Acrobat. Hence, you need to know something about the internal structure of documents and what programs to use to create the structure required by Acrobat to make a document accessible. Not all the content in a document travels through the PDF creation process with information necessary to make a document completely accessible. Therefore, you need to perform some work in Acrobat to either add accessibility or to polish up a document for delivery to a screen reader in a form that makes sense to the user. In this chapter, I cover how to make documents accessible from authoring programs, as well as how to use Acrobat tools to make existing documents accessible.

Setting Up the Work Environment

The essential tools for working with document accessibility ...