How to Make a PDF Accessible With Adobe Acrobat

PDF accessibility depends on embedded structural information rather than visual appearance, requiring tags, real text, document titles and language settings, image alternative text, form-field descriptions, and a logical reading order so assistive technologies can interpret content correctly. Adobe Acrobat Pro’s Accessibility Checker evaluates PDFs against PDF/UA and WCAG-related rules, classifying results as passed, failed, requiring manual review, or skipped, while emphasizing that reading order, color contrast, complex tables, and the usefulness of reported issues must be assessed by people. Common fixes include automatically tagging PDFs, applying OCR to scanned documents, configuring titles and languages in document properties, supplying alt text or marking decorative images as artifacts, adding form tooltips, and setting tab order and bookmarks. An inspection of an IRS W-9 form found that it included tags, a structure tree, language metadata, and a stored title, but did not display the title in viewers and relied on XFA-based form descriptions that may not work consistently across PDF viewers. The discussion also notes that Section 508 and ADA Title II can impose accessibility obligations on public-facing PDFs, particularly documents used for applications, services, policies, and other essential activities, and recommends prioritizing those files alongside the web pages that link to them.

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