PDF files are a common way of providing course content to your students. An accessible PDF file is a file that contains structure, text and alt text that can be communicated to assistive technology like screen readers. If the assistive technology can tell that this information is there, it can convey the content to your students. In this video I'm going to show you how to recognize when there is real text in your existing PDF files and not just images of text. And I'll introduce to PDF tags and alt text. You'll probably find some of these ideas familiar from our previous video on making accessible word documents. Then I'll show you how to create accessible PDF files and share some step-by-step guides with you. And last but not least, I'll show you how to check for accessibility of the PDF files you create. Some PDF files are image only files containing scans or images of the original content. These types of PDF files are inaccessible for those using assistive technologies, as there is no structure, alt text or computer text for the assistive device to convey. To check to see if a PDF is image only, you can try to select or highlight the text in the documents. Notice in this example of an image only PDF, my attempts to select the text results in just drawing a highlight box rather than highlighting lines of text. Here is a PDF that includes real text not an image of text. When I try to highlight the text I'm able to highlight individual words, lines and entire paragraphs of text. If I wanted to I could copy and paste this text into a Word document or an email and it would recognized as text by the other software. Image-only pdf files can be difficult for all of your students as scanned text can be visually difficult to read and prevents the use of commonly used tools like Adobe's Read Aloud feature. We recommend avoiding the use of image-only pdf files in your courses. For a PDF to be accessible it needs to have real computer text, not an image of text. It needs structure indicated by tags, we'll talk more about tags in just a moment, and it also needs to have alt text for any images within the documents. If your PDF file contains real computer text, not just an image of text, you can allow assistive devices to recognize this text by adding structure through the use of tags. Tags are similar to Styles in Microsoft Word and for those of you familiar with HTML, PDF tags are similar to HTML tags. It's a way of labelling the components of your file content as headings, text, tables, figures and so on. It also provides the ordering for how content can be presented to those using screen readers. Content that is tagged as an image can also be given alt text, a concise description of the relevant information conveyed by the image. By adding tags and alt text to your PDF file, assistive devices can convey all of the content to the user. If you generate a PDF from a Microsoft Word 2010 or 2013 document, you can transfer a use of styles and alt text when you generate a PDF file. You need to make sure you have some specific options selected when you generate the PDF file. Specifically, create bookmarks using headings and document structured tags for accessibility. With these options selected your use of styles will convert to tags and your alt texts will carry over into the PDF file. You can find step-by-step instructions for generating tagged PDF files for Microsoft Word 2010 or 2013 in the resources for this module. If you do not have access to the original document that a PDF file was generated from, but still need to make the PDF file accessible, you'll have to add tags and alt text directly to the PDF file using Adobe Acrobat Pro or equivalent Adobe products. You can find step-by-step instructions for tagging and adding alt text to a PDF file in the resources for this module. If you use a Mac, and would like to make an accessible PDF from the content created in Word for Mac, your styles and alt texts will not transfer to a PDF file, and will not result in an accessible PDF. You will need to generate a PDF file from your Word document and then add tags and alt text directly to the PDF file using Adobe Acrobat Pro or equivalent Adobe product. You can use the same step by step instructions for tagging, and adding alt text to a PDF available in the resources for this module. Adobe Acrobat products contain an accessibility checker to help ensure that you have accessibility information in place for your documents. To run the accessibility checker in Adobe Acrobat Pro, select the accessibility tool, full check, then start checking. A list of issues will appear on the left. In this document we have not yet added tags, or alt text, so there are many issues found. In this second document, we have added our tags and alt texts so no issues are found. You can also check that the accessibility information is available to assistive technology by seeing if you can listen to your content with a screen reader. There are many screen readers available, including free options like NVDA for PCs and Voiceover for Mac. Remember to check out the resources available in this module for step-by-step guides and tutorials for making accessible PDF files from Word documents.
