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Take advantage of SensusAccess from anywhereYou 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 Acrobat's built-in Action Wizard [YouTube] and choosing Make Accessible.tools from within Acrobat.
Image-only PDFs
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 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:
Go to All tools
Choose Scan & OCR
Then Enhance scanned file
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:
Go to Recognize Text
Correct recognized text
Make any necessary changes
Save the file
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
Our librarians are well-versed in finding accessible content and can be very useful resources. Visit the library's research support page for more information.
Use the power of the internet
Another option—instead of fixing an existing PDF—is to use a web link to an HTML version of the document. Generally, HTML is one of the most accessible document formats.
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