Adobe Acrobat Accessibility Checklist
This checklist serves as a guide to make sure documentation in Adobe Acrobat is accessible.
To run a full check on your document to see what errors/issues in Acrobat are flagged, go to Accessibility Tool Pane and select Full Check.
To see if the Author and Title are added, go to File, Properties, and select the Description tab.
The Reading language of the document has to match the text. To verify the Reading language, go to File, Properties, Advanced tab, and select Language.
Page numbers should be tagged as artifacts.
To check go to Page Thumbnails on the left panel and right-click on the page to start numbering.
Choose Page Labels and select if you want All pages or the range of pages.
Go to Enhance Scans and run the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to confirm that the document has recognizable text.
If the document is more than nine pages, a bookmark is required. Bookmarks are best at the end when the heading structure tagging is finalized.
Select the Bookmarks panel on the left side of the screen and check if bookmarks have been placed correctly in the logical reading order of the document.
Go to Accessibility Tool pane then open Reading Order and Tags Panel to check if the headings are in a proper hierarchy structure.
- The Title of the document should be listed as Heading 1 <H1>.
- Any major subsection titles should be listed as Heading 2 <H2>.
- Further subsection titles can be Heading 3 and 4 <H3> and <H4>.
- Section headings are properly tagged and ordered in the document.
All images require alternative text that describes what is happening in the photo. Go to Accessibility Tools Pane and select Reading Order to see if the images were tagged as <figure>.
For alternative text on images, it is best to utilize the following:
- Do not include: "image of..." or "photo of..." or "graphic of...".
- Decorative images should be tagged as "artifacts."
- Limit the use of text as images.
It is recommended to select colors with deep contrast between the foreground and background. Provide captions if using color to convey meaning.
Use the Colour Contrast Analyzer to ensure accessible contrast.
Links should be clear and related to the title or heading of the linked page. Review all of the links on your document to ensure it is descriptive enough and if it leads to an active page.
- Do not use the same link text to refer to different resources.
- Do not use different link text to refer to the same resources.
- Avoid Read More and Click Here.
Tables should be used to organize data and not to be used to format as a layout. If data tables are present in the document, they should have:
- A summary
- With the Reading Order Tool open, right click the desired table and select Edit table summary.
- Heading cells for columns or rows
- With the Reading Order Tool open, select a table and select Table Editor Mode.
- From there, right click on header cells and select Table Cell Properties and change the cell type to Header and associate either column or row depending on which header cell it is.
- Data cells must be marked as data cells
- With the Reading Order Tool open, select a table and select Table Editor Mode.
- From there, right click on data cells and select Table Cell Properties to change cell type to data cell.
- If complex data tables are present, they should be organized with proper data cell association with header cells.
- With the Reading Order Tool open, select the table and then select Table Editor.
- From there, right click on the data cell and check to ensure that under Associated Header Cell IDs, the headers of each row or column the data cell is under, it listed there.
Confirm that the reading order of the document makes logical sense. Select the Z-Order Panel and drag and drop tagged elements to reorder text.
Use the tab key on the keyboard to verify that the content in the document is accessible using a keyboard.
You are done. Great job!