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Creating Accessible Documents and PDFs

Creating Accessible Documents and PDFs

Owned by Corrine Schoeb
Last updated: Jan 13, 2025Version comment
13 min read

Accessibility is crucial for ensuring that all users, including those with disabilities, can access your materials. The key is preparing the source content for optimal accessibility.  What follows are key steps and tools for creating accessible documents across various platforms like Microsoft Office, Google Workspace, and Adobe Acrobat.

Deepen your understanding: How people interact with content 

To really understand more about how different people interact with your content we suggest exploring Stories of Web Users from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Swarthmore’s Accessibility Awareness Training course is also available if you’d like a general understanding of physical and digital accessibility.  Please reach out to accessibility@ if you are unable to access the course.

[link to SR demo]

Creating accessible PDFs doesn’t have to be difficult. What we share here is how to create accessible PDFs for our everyday content. If you are doing something more involved, we strongly recommend the LinkedIn Learning course titled Creating Accessible PDFs by Chad Chelius. LinkedIn Learning is a free learning resource available to everyone at Swarthmore.

General Guidelines for Accessibility

A Note About Scans

Before you create scans of content, please visit and follow the advice on the University of Washington’s page about Creating High Quality Scans. This will increase the likelihood of creating a more accurate and accessible document.

All Swarthmore copiers are set to create OCR (Optical Character Recognition) scans. In other words, they will do their best to convert scans to text rather than pictures of text. 

Once the scan is created, jump to Acrobat for PDFs.

Microsoft Office Documents

  • Install Microsoft Office 365.

  • Check for Updates: If you have Microsoft Office 365 installed, ensure your version is updated by navigating to: 

    • Help (in the top menu)

    • Check for Updates.

  • Open the document you want to work on.

  • Check Document Structure: Ensuring proper document structure is helpful for many and essential for those who use screen readers. Fortunately, this is very easy to check.

    • View (in the Ribbon)

    • Check Navigation Pane

    • Select the Document Map. This is the second tab on the left side of your document and it looks like a bulleted list.

    • If the Document Map has no contents or does not make sense as an overview of what is in each section of the material, use built-in headings, lists, and styles to provide structure. See: In-program Styles in "Fast Five" Essentials to Preparing Materials.

A visual path to the document map in Word on a Mac
A visual path to the document map on a Windows machine. It is slightly different in that the Window’s version uses the text “Headings”.

  • Accessibility Checker: Run the Accessibility Checker and make any suggested fixes. Keep in mind that the Accessibility Checker does not check document structure. Important note: Always run it before exporting to PDF. See: In-program Accessibility Checkers in “Fast Five” Essentials to Preparing Materials

    • Select the Review menu.

    • Run Accessibility Checker.

    • Fix any issues found.

    • Proceed to the metadata step.

  • Set the Language: Add the document language to ensure documents are read in the correct language. See: Setting a language in “Fast Five” Essentials to Preparing Materials.

    • Depending on what version of Microsoft Office you have there may be a couple of ways to set the language:

      • Method one

        • Select Tools from the top menu.

        • Select Language.

      • Method two

        • Select File from the top menu.

        • Select Options.

        • Select Language.

      • Method three

        • Navigate to the Review menu.

        • About the fourth section from the left is Language.

        • Select Language.

        • Select Set your proofing language.

        • Change the language for selected text or current document as needed.

        • If this is the language you regularly write and work in, select Set as Default.

  • Metadata: Add a title and fill in properties to make your documents easier to find:

    • Select the File menu.

    • Select Properties.

    • Select the Summary tab.

    • Fill out the Title and any other relevant fields with proper information or metadata.

    • Select OK.

Exporting Microsoft Office 365 materials to PDF

  1. Run the Accessibility Checker.

  2. Make any suggested corrections. 

  3. Recheck the document if necessary until all tests are passed.

  4. Navigate to the File menu.

  5. Select Save As.  

  6. in the File Format field, select PDF.

  7. Choose Best for electronic distribution and accessibility (use Microsoft online service).

  8. Select Export.

Exporting to PDF using Microsoft Office 2019

Windows

If you are running Microsoft Office 2019 on Windows, you can follow these instructions:

  1. Select Save As Adobe PDF,

  2. Open the Options menu,

  3. Ensure that Convert document information and Enable Accessibility and Reflow with tagged Adobe PDF are selected.

  4. Select Save.

  5. If necessary, select More options…

    1. Add a title here if one doesn’t yet exist.

    2. Select Options to ensure Document structure tags for accessibility and PDF/A compliant are selected.

Mac

  1. Select the File menu.

  2. Choose the Save As option. (an alternative to selecting the menus is the keyboard shortcut: Shift + Command + S.)

  3. Choose a location on your computer to save the PDF version.

  4. Change the File Format field to PDF.

  5. Select “Best for electronic distribution and accessibility”. 

  6. Click “Export”.

Additional Resources for Microsoft Office Documents

Google Workspace Documents

Important note: Our experience indicates that the Microsoft Office suite does a more thorough job when converting materials to PDFs than Google Workspace. This is particularly true if you change any of the default settings. We recommend exporting your Google Workspace documents to the Microsoft Office equivalent first, using the Accessibility Checker, and then exporting to PDF.

Grackle add-on 

Use the Grackle add-on as the accessibility checker for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Each document type has its own extension e.g. Grackle Docs, Grackle Sheets, or Grackle Slides—Grackle will help you with the following:

  • Checking Accessibility;

  • Setting the language;

  • And adding metadata like title.

Installing Grackle

To add the Grackle plugin you must have a Google suite document open. Follow the directions below or visit Grackle - Making Google Documents Accessible on the ITS blog. 

  1. Select the Extensions menu.

  2. Navigate to Add-ons.

  3. Select Get Add-ons.

  4. Search for Grackle.

  5. Select and install Grackle for the app you’re currently using (Docs, Sheets, Slides).

Running Grackle

  1. Go to Extensions on the top menu.

  2. Choose Grackle Docs (or Grackle Sheets, or Grackle Slides).

  3. Choose Launch. It may take several seconds to run.

  4. Make any required changes. 

  5. Recheck with Grackle until all tests are passed.

Important Note: if you have tables and/or images in your document, Grackle may show you a screen with what appears to be a single button with Locate and Tag. These are actually two separate buttons, Locate and Tag. 

  • Selecting Locate will take you to the place in the document where the error is. 

  • Selecting Tag will activate a pop-up for you to fill in with the proper information.  

In Grackle, Locate and +TAG look like one big button but are two different buttons

Important Note: If your document contains several tables, we highly recommend using Microsoft products as these make it easier to create accessible tables.

Exporting Google materials to PDF

Important note: If your document is complex, we recommend using Microsoft Word rather than GSuite. Word has better tools to increase accessibility in complex documents.

  1. Run Grackle. 

  2. Make any suggested corrections. 

  3. Recheck the document if necessary until all tests are passed.

  4. In the Grackle panel, select Export to PDF. You may have to grant permissions to Grackle on your first export or if you’ve recently cleared your cache.

  5. A modal window will open. Choose Start.

Grackle has a window that prompts the export to an accessible PDF and shows its progress.

A Common Grackle Error

Chrome can get confused when there is more than one user logged in to a browser, and it causes add-ons to hang. Visit Grackle not responding for possible solutions.

Pages (Apple)

Pages does not have an accessibility checker, but you can follow the other general guidelines for accessibility which include the following:

Use Styles and Headings 

Apply heading styles by selecting Format and choosing appropriate headings.

  1. Type the text you want into Pages.

  2. Select a sentence/phrase that you want to become a heading.

  3. Select Format. 

  4. Select the heading you want, such as the Heading 1 button. 

See also: Intro to paragraph styles in Pages | Mac help.

Setting language

  1. Choose File from the menu at the top of your screen.

  2. Select Advanced.

  3. Choose the Language & Region

  4. In the dialog box that appears, first choose Language

    • Important Note: According to Apple support page on Change a document’s language and formatting, changing the language of a document may reset the language and region of your computer. However, we have not experienced this. If you do discover this has happened, go to: 

      • System Settings, 

      • Search for Language & Region,

      • Change to your preferred language, 

      • and ensure it is set as the Primary.

  5. Next, choose Region.

  6. Choose Okay.

Exporting Pages documents to PDF

Pages documents can be exported to PDF, but additional accessibility checks and modifications are often required in Adobe Acrobat to ensure compliance. Fixing documents in Acrobat can be very time consuming. We strongly recommend pulling your document into Microsoft Word rather than Acrobat.

LibreOffice

Exporting LibreOffice materials to PDF

  • Choose Export As > PDF. 

  • Select Tagged PDF or Universal Accessibility (PDF/UA) for better accessibility.

Adobe Acrobat for PDFs

You can work with PDF documents or convert documents to and from PDFs in many ways. Adobe Acrobat is available for download for all Swarthmore community members. It is also installed on all of the computers in Swarthmore’s public computing labs. The instructions below pertain to Acrobat version 24.4.20272.0 or higher.  If you have an older version of Acrobat, please update to the latest version.

Adobe Acrobat Accessibility: Considerations

Fewer accessibility errors occur when one creates the document in Microsoft, runs the Accessibility Checker and then uses the Save As…PDF option.

Important Note: Do not create forms in Acrobat. PDF forms are very very difficult to make accessible. If you need to create an accessible form, please contact ITS Support for help.

Using Acrobat to Increase Accessibility 

There are several elements in PDFs that are required to make them accessible. These include:

  • Preparing the original document, regardless of the tool you use (e.g. Word, Sheets, scanned document) for optimal accessibility.

  • Ensuring text is text and not a picture of text. 

  • Providing tags or structure.

  • Providing meaningful alternative text for all images that are not marked as decorative.

  • Testing reading order.

  • Providing a title in the metadata. 

  • Identifying the global language of the material in the metadata. 

You can check each of these individually, or you can use one of Acrobat’s built-in tools to help.

Acrobat’s automated accessibility tool

The tool we have found to be most helpful is the Make Accessible tool. For whatever reason, it is a little hard to find right out of the box, but you can easily find it using the following steps:

  1. Open the document you want to work on.

  2. Use the Search tool. 

  3. Enter Manage Actions.

  4. Choose Make Accessible, 

  5. and follow the prompts.

If you can’t find “Manage Actions” use Acrobat’s search tool. Remember a document has to be opened to get access to this menu.

Older versions of Acrobat

If the instructions above don’t match what you are seeing, you may have an older version of Acrobat and we encourage you to update to the most recent version as soon as you can. That said, you can still take advantage of the built-in tools but the path is a little different. In older versions, look for Action Wizard under Tools, and then choose Make Accessible.  You can also use search while in the document, only the search term will be “Action Wizard”.

Scanned PDFs 

You may wish to scan material for a course or other purpose. Follow the steps on the University of Washington’s Creating High Quality Scans to prepare the material.  There is a direct correlation between the quality of the document to be scanned and the accuracy of the conversion to text.

Quickly Check a Scan Using Copy/Paste

To quickly double-check the quality of a scan:

  1. Choose 2-3 different pages or areas of the PDF. 

  2. Copy each page or area.

  3. Paste that content into a text editor like Notepad or Word.

  4. Evaluate: How accurate is the paste? If there is fewer than one error per paragraph, you have a good scan.

Making pre-existing PDFs Accessible 

Add additional attributes to the PDF

  1. Select Make Accessible to automate many of the tagging processes. 

  2. Use the Accessibility Check tool to identify and fix any remaining issues. Use Tags to create an accessible reading order. 

  3. Add alternative text for images by right-clicking the image and selecting Edit Alt Text.

  4. Check and fix Reading Order. 

    1. Reading order is particularly important and can be quite illogical. For example, you might think that the first paragraph you see is what is read first, but this is not always the case. The only way to determine if the reading order is correct is to check it.

SensusAccess for Document Conversion

Use SensusAccess to convert documents to accessible formats like tagged PDFs, audio, Braille, or e-text. This service is useful when dealing with non-text-based PDFs.

Best practices for PDF accessibility

  • Prepare source content: Prepare the original document, regardless of the tool you use (e.g. Word, Sheets, scanned document), for optimal accessibility.

  • Avoid PDF Forms: Creating accessible PDF forms can be extremely challenging. Consider web forms or seek assistance from your IT support team to discuss accessible options.

  • Use HTML for Web Content: HTML is inherently more accessible than PDFs. If possible, provide content in HTML format or offer a web version of your document.

  • Principles of Accessible Design: Follow best practices for digital accessibility as outlined in Ability Net’s article “ The seven principles of universal design”.

  • Webpage Creation: Ensure that your web content adheres to accessibility standards. For additional information on web pages see: 

  • Remember that PDFs are not recommended for STEM content. 

    • The primary reason is that formulas are often converted to images which require descriptive text (alt text).  That descriptive text can become quite cumbersome and inefficient compared to a formula. Many in the field recommend tools such as Chem4Word, Wiris’ MathType and ChemType, and leaving the material in LaTeX if that is your authoring tool.

Resources

Deepen your understanding of users

Software

PDF

Adobe Specific

General Information

Universal Design

Related content

Ways you can contact ITS or find information:

ITS Support Portal: https://support.swarthmore.edu
Email: support@swarthmore.edu
Phone: x4357 (HELP) or 610-328-8513
Check out our remote resources at https://swatkb.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/remote/overview
Check our homepage at https://swarthmore.edu/its