The PDF format has long been a major barrier to accessibility for people with disabilities. A huge amount of content on the web and elsewhere is provided in this format which, up until fairly recently, has been fundamentally inaccessible.

The problem is that the PDF format began life simply a pictorial representation of a document. It contained information about the layout of a document and the included fonts but not the content itself. Those who could not see the document could not read it.

Accessibility Improvements

Adobe have gradually improved this situation by exposing the interface and the content of documents to screen reading software. In addition Adobe have added accessibility ‘tags’, a layer that sits above the document and describes the document content. These two features have made it possible to create accessible pdf documents that contain ‘real text’, not images of text, and information about the structure and flow of documents as well as embedded images and multimedia.

(screenshot showing a Heading tag in a PDF document. This is one of the structural tags that improve the accessibility of PDF documents)

Next, What are the current options for making PDF documents accessible?

EnablePDF Tour

Background: How Accessible is the PDF format?

Options for making PDFs accessible

How Enable PDF will help

How the service works

How will it be priced?