Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional

About accessibility features

A document or application is accessible if it can be used by people with disabilities—such as mobility impairments, blindness, and low vision—and not just by people who can see well and use a mouse. Accessibility features in Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Reader, and Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) make it easier for people with disabilities to use PDF documents and forms, with or without the aid of assistive software and devices such as screen readers, screen magnifiers, and braille printers.

Making PDFs accessible tends to benefit all users. For example, the underlying document structure that makes it possible for a screen reader to properly read a PDF out loud also makes it possible for a mobile device to correctly reflow and display the document on a small screen. Similarly, the preset tab order of an accessible PDF form helps all users—not just users with mobility impairments—fill the form more easily.

Accessibility features in Acrobat and Reader fall into two broad categories: features to make the reading of PDF documents more accessible and features to create accessible PDF documents. To create accessible PDF documents, you must use Acrobat, not Reader.

Features for accessible reading of PDFs

  • Preferences and commands to optimize output for assistive software and devices, such as saving as accessible text for a braille printer

  • Preferences and commands to make navigation of PDFs more accessible, such as automatic scrolling and opening PDFs to the last page read

  • Accessibility Setup Assistant for easy setting of most preferences related to accessibility

  • Keyboard alternates to mouse actions

  • Reflow capability to temporarily present the text of a PDF in a single easy-to-read column

  • Read Out Loud text-to-speech conversion

  • Support for screen readers and screen magnifiers

Features for creating accessible PDFs

  • Creation of tagged PDFs from authoring applications

  • Conversion of untagged PDFs to tagged PDFs

  • Security setting that allows screen readers to access text while preventing users from copying, printing, editing, and extracting text

  • Ability to add text to scanned pages to improve accessibility

  • Tools for editing reading order and document structure

  • Tools for creating accessible PDF forms

Though Acrobat Standard provides some functionality for making existing PDFs accessible, you must use Acrobat Professional or Acrobat 3D to perform certain tasks—such as editing reading order or editing document structure tags—that may be necessary to make some PDF documents and forms accessible.

For more information about creating accessible PDFs and using accessibility features to read PDFs, see http://www.adobe.com/go/accessibility.