PDF Accessibility: A Practical Beginner's Guide

Accessibility is the difference between a document anyone can read and one that excludes a chunk of your audience. Accessible PDFs are also legally required in many sectors — and easier to make than most people think.

What makes a PDF accessible?

• Tagged structure — headings, paragraphs, lists and tables are properly labelled so a screen reader can navigate.
• Reading order — the document reads logically, even when laid out in columns.
• Image alt text — meaningful descriptions for every informative image.
• Real text, not images of text — scan-only PDFs are unreadable for screen readers until OCR'd.
• Sufficient color contrast — at least 4.5:1 for body text.
• Document language set in the metadata.
• A descriptive title in the document properties.

Quick wins for existing PDFs

1. Run OCR on any scanned PDFs.
2. Add a meaningful title and language to the metadata.
3. Use Acrobat's accessibility checker (or a similar tool) to find untagged content.
4. Provide alt text for every figure.

Standards to know

• PDF/UA — the universal accessibility standard for PDFs.
• WCAG 2.1 AA — the web standard, applied to PDFs in many regulations.
• Section 508 (US) and the European Accessibility Act govern many public-sector documents.

Build accessibility in from the start

Use Word's built-in heading styles, descriptive link text and alt text on images, then export to PDF with Word to PDF with the "tagged PDF" option enabled. You'll start 80% accessible by default.