PDF Best Practices

Accessible PDFs are PDF files that can be read and used by everyone. They have machine-readable text, good document structure, and descriptions for images.

PDFs can be made accessible when created from a source document such as Microsoft Word. Existing PDFs can also be fixed to improve accessibility, with some limitations.

Create Accessible PDFs

When starting from Google Docs or Microsoft Word, it is easy to create an accessible PDF in many cases.

Google Docs

Note: Grackle may not perform well on long documents.

Microsoft Word

Many other authoring tools allow export to PDF but may not create accessible PDFs. Learn more below:

  • Canva
    • PDFs are not reliably accessible
    • Requires fixing after export
    • No support for multiple heading levels, footnotes
  • InDesign
    • PDFs can be made accessible
    • Requires significant expertise and actions during authoring
  • LaTeX compilers
    • PDFs are not reliably accessible
    • Recommend output to accessible HTML as alternative format
    • PDFs do not support math accessible content

Fix Existing PDFs

When starting with an existing PDF, you can fix many accessibility issues automatically in Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Before you start, open Adobe and go to Preferences > Accessibility and check the Enable cloud-based auto-tagging for accessibility checkbox.

Open a PDF in Acrobat and choose All tools > Prepare for accessibility.

  • Select Automatically tag PDF
  • Select Add alternate text, and manually add appropriate text alternative for each image
  • Save PDF with updated file name

Note: This fixing workflow in Adobe will not fix all accessibility issues in every PDF.

Understand Best Practices for Accessible PDFs

The best practices below apply to PDFs in general. More information about how to achieve them is provided in PDF training resources.

Text and Reading Order

  • Include “machine readable text” that can be read out loud by assistive technology tools
    • For PDFs created from scans, use OCR (optical character recognition) to turn text into machine-readable text
  • Make sure text elements are in the right order
  • Use headings to identify document sections

Tagged PDF

  • Make sure the PDF has tags
  • Use tags correctly to identify headings, paragraphs, lists, tables, and images

Title

  • Make sure the PDF has a meaningful title

Alternative Text

  • Describe images in alt text

Tables

  • Use tags correctly in tables to identify table headers

Color Contrast

  • Use font colors that have enough contrast to background color (dark text on light background)

More information on these options is available in the training pathways:

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