Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

Add accessible links

With thoughtfully provided links, users can quickly move from one part of a document to another, to related information in a different document, or to a website that is relevant to the content.

For URLs to be accessible to screen readers, you must convert them to active links and make sure that they are correctly tagged in the PDF.

Note: If you tagged the Adobe PDF during conversion from an authoring application, the links and URLs in the document are probably already active and included in the tag tree so that they are accessible to screen readers. You probably don’t have to do this task unless you want to add more links.

Acrobat provides several ways to create active links for text, objects, and URLs in a PDF. However, the methods differ in how they affect the tag tree. The best way to create accessible links is with the Create Link command.

Unlike the other methods for creating links in a tagged PDF (by using the Links tool or the Create From URLs In Document command), the Create Link command adds all three tags that screen readers require in order to recognize a link. The other methods create only one of the three tags, meaning that you must manually edit the tag tree to add the remaining two tags for each link and place these tags in the proper reading order in the tree. Although you must activate links one by one, using the Create Link command provides the fastest results and the least amount of follow-up work to make the links accessible to screen readers. All that is left to do is optional editing of the tag tree to add alternate text to the new links.

Creating links with Acrobat Standard doesn’t generate any tags for the links.

Do the following to make links active and add them to the tag tree:

  1. Select the text or object for which you want to create a link.
  2. Right-click/Control-click the selection, and choose Create Link from the context menu.
  3. In the Create Link dialog box, select the appropriate options, and then follow the on-screen instructions to specify a URL, page view, or file as the link target.

By default, the selected text for each link becomes the link text. After you add all the links, you can edit the tag tree to add alternate text to the links, further improving the accessibility of the PDF.