Adobe Acrobat Pro can be used to create accessible PDFs and to check the accessibility of existing PDFs. In most cases, Acrobat Pro can improve the accessibility of existing PDFs. This is especially important for scanned PDFs such as scanned pages of books.
All faculty and staff have access to Acrobat Pro along with other Adobe Creative Cloud apps. To download the software, simply visit https://creativecloud.adobe.com/ and log in with your FSU credentials (your full email address in this case). Once logged in, you will have the opportunity to download any and all Adobe Creative Cloud apps that you need.
Make Scanned Documents Accessible
There are several features that must be set in order to make a scanned PDF accessible for screen readers including: converting the scanned text into machine-encoded text and adding alt-text to images. It is possible to add many of these features at once using Acrobat's Make Accessible action:
- Choose All Tools > Use Guided Actions. [In the older Adobe Acrobat version: Tools>Action Wizard]
- From the Actions List, click Make Accessible.
- The right-hand pane changes to display each task included in the Make Accessible action, as well as the instructions to execute the action.
- Select the files that you want to apply the Make Accessible action to. By default, the action runs on the document that's currently open. Select Add Files to select additional files or a folder to run the action on.
- Click Start.
- Follow the prompts to complete the Make Accessible action.
Acrobat will identify images in the documents and prompt you to add alt-text, but it will not write the alt-text for you. The Accessibility checker may also prompt to indicate that there are actions that require manual input or manual checking - such as confirming the reading order of page elements. The document should not be considers "Accessible" until it has been manually checked.
Additional Resources:
CASA Procedures for the Provision of Course Materials in an Accessible Format
Making Print and Scanned Documents Accessible with Adobe Acrobat (Guide from University of Wisconsin Green Bay)