Adobe offers several tools for the creation of accessible PDF forms:

Acrobat Professional or Acrobat 3D

Use either application to open untagged or tagged PDF forms (except PDF forms that are created from LiveCycle Designer) to add fillable form fields, such as text boxes, check boxes, and buttons. Then use the application’s other tools to make the form accessible by adding descriptions to form fields, tagging untagged forms, setting the set tab order, manipulating tags, and performing the other PDF accessibility tasks.

Adobe PDF Forms Access

Use this tool to open and tag untagged PDF forms that you created by using Acrobat Professional or Acrobat 3D, and to manipulate the tags of these forms. You can then open the tagged PDF in Acrobat Professional or Acrobat 3D and perform other accessibility tasks. If you often process complex untagged PDF forms, consider purchasing Adobe PDF Forms Access. Its tagging feature is optimized for interpreting forms content, and its tags editor is much easier to use than the tags editor in Acrobat Professional or Acrobat 3D for correcting tagging problems in forms.

LiveCycle Designer

(Available in Acrobat Professional and Acrobat 3D) Use this product to design and build new forms or to import untagged PDF forms and make their form fields fillable and accessible. You can deploy forms in tagged PDF, XML, and other formats from LiveCycle Designer. Once you create or edit an Acrobat form in LiveCycle Designer, it becomes a LiveCycle Designer file—it is no longer a PDF that you can edit or manipulate in Acrobat. Both Acrobat and Reader can open and read PDF forms that you create from LiveCycle Designer. These PDF forms, however, don’t include permissions to modify the file. You should therefore use LiveCycle Designer only for PDFs that are intended to contain only form-based information. Don’t use it to add form fields to a document that combines pages of narrative with an occasional page that has form fields. In this case, you should use Acrobat Professional or Acrobat 3D to add the form fields and then complete the accessibility tasks for the rest of the document’s content.

Authoring applications

Most authoring applications that you can use to design forms don’t retain their fillable form fields when you convert the files to PDF. You therefore need to use the forms tools in Acrobat Professional or Acrobat 3D to add fillable form fields. Moreover, if you tag the form during conversion to PDF, the authoring application may generate inappropriate tags for the text labels of the form fields. In a complex form, for instance, the text labels for all the fields may run together into a single line that screen readers can’t interpret as individual labels. Such reading order problems can require time-consuming work in Acrobat Professional or Acrobat 3D to split the labels apart. In this case, producing an untagged PDF form from the authoring application is sometimes the better course. You can then use the Forms tools in Acrobat Professional or Acrobat 3D to add fillable form fields before you tag the entire document. Some forms, however, are straightforward enough that you can produce a tagged PDF from the authoring application and do only light touchup in Acrobat Professional or Acrobat 3D after you add the fillable form fields.