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Comment: added new instructions from Acrobat - what we had no longer applies with the current version of Acrobat

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Info

Take advantage of SensusAccess from anywhere

You do not have to be on campus to take advantage of this service.

Use Adobe Acrobat

PDFs are notoriously difficult to make fully accessible; however, you can make improvements by using tools from within Acrobat.

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Many PDFs are not text based even though they contain text, but how do you know? One very quick way is to try to copy a few sections and paste those sections elsewhere. If you cannot copy parts f

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of the page, you are likely dealing with an PDF that is a picture of text. When a PDF is a picture of text the information is not available to those who listen, particularly screen reader users.

Acrobat has a built-in tool to help called Scan & OCR. This tool will attempt to convert your image based document to a text-based document. I say “attempt” because there are many factors that contribute to inaccurate text conversions (see the Scanning tips sectiton above). To convert an image based PDF to text follow these steps:

  1. Go to All tools

  2. Choose Scan & OCR

  3. Then Enhance scanned file

  4. Choose All Pages from the drop down and make sure Recognize Text is checked

Acrobat has now done its best convert images of text to text. But how will you know if it was an accurate conversion? There are two ways, using Acrobat’s new Correct recognized text and by using the copy paste method again. We recommend using Acrobat’s new tool first, saving the document after corrections are made, then attempting the copy paste method. To use this new tool:

  1. Go to Recognize Text

  2. Correct recognized text

  3. Make any necessary changes

  4. Save the file

  5. Do the copy paste check

For more information from Adobe, visit Create and verify PDF accessibility (Acrobat Pro)

Other options - our libraries and the internet

Take advantage of our librarians

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