Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

Check accessibility with Full Check

Use Full Check to check a PDF for many of the characteristics of accessible PDFs.

You can choose which kinds of accessibility problems to look for and how you want to view the results.

  1. Choose Advanced > Accessibility > Full Check.
  2. Select options for how you want to view the results, the page range to check, and which types of accessibility problems to check for.
  3. Click Start Checking.
    Note: A full accessibility check can be time-consuming. You can stop the process by pressing the Esc key. Consider choosing a smaller page range.

    You can choose to view the results of a full accessibility check as an HTML file or as comments that are placed throughout the document where the accessibility problems are detected.

    Because the Full Check feature is unable to distinguish between essential and nonessential content types, it may report issues that don’t affect readability. It’s a good idea to review all issues to determine which ones require correction.

Accessibility Full Check options

Create Accessibility Report
Creates an HTML report of accessibility issues, which is opened in the navigation pane and saved in the location indicated by the Folder field.

Include Repair Hints In Accessibility Report
Adds suggestions for fixing accessibility problems to the HTML report or comments.

Create Comments In Document
Adds comments to the document that indicate accessibility problems.
Delete all accessibility comments from the PDF after you repair the accessibility issues.

Page Range
The range of pages to check.

Name
The set of accessibility criteria to check. For the Section 508 and W3C guidelines, the options area includes a Browse button that links to the website for the respective guidelines. Select Adobe PDF to choose from options for the Adobe PDF accessibility standard:
Alternative Descriptions Are Provided
Checks for tagged figures that are missing alternate text.

Text Language Is Specified
Checks for paragraphs that don’t have a language specified for them. Setting the language for an entire document in the Document Properties dialog box corrects all errors related to this option.

Reliable Character Encoding Is Provided
Checks for fonts that are inaccessible to screen readers and other assistive software. Fonts must contain enough information for Acrobat to correctly extract all the characters to text. If one or more fonts don’t allow for the correct extraction of all the characters, the PDF is inaccessible.

All Content Is Contained In The Document Structure
Checks for page elements that may have been overlooked during tagging. Adding these elements to the tag tree (if necessary) ensures that a screen reader can present the content to a user.

All Form Fields Have Descriptions
Checks for form fields that are missing descriptions.

Tab Order Is Consistent With The Structure Order
Checks whether tags properly reflect the document’s structure.

List And Table Structure Is Correct
Checks whether tags that have been generated for lists and tables meet the requirements of tagged PDF.