PDF Accessibility Repair Workflow Overview-2

Brief PDF accessibility overview 

This module describes the overall process of creating accessible PDFs. 

Various types of PDFs that are encountered:

• scanned image-based PDFs (that do not have searchable text)
• text-based PDFs (that have searchable text but no tags)

Whenever possible, accessibility should be incorporated directly into a word-processing document. This lessens the repair workload required in Adobe Acrobat. It is significantly more work and much more time-consuming to remediate in Adobe Acrobat DC, than it is in Microsoft Word.

For example, if changes are only made in the PDF and not in Microsoft Word, a significant amount of accessibility work will need to be done in Adobe Acrobat DC each time the document is updated. 

Use the following steps as a guide to help check PDF accessibility. This module is meant to lay down the foundation of what you need to know.

At the end of this module, you should be able to:

• Describe how to approach the different types of PDFs, based on whether the PDF is image or text-based. 
• List the steps in creating an accessible PDF.