Make adobe pdf forms accessible, Add accessible links – Adobe Acrobat 9 PRO Extended User Manual
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USING ACROBAT 9 PRO EXTENDED
Accessibility, tags, and reflow
Last updated 9/30/2011
3 Ctrl-drag around nontext page elements—such as figures and captions—to deselect them, until only text is selected
on the page. Click Text in the TouchUp Reading Order dialog box.
4 In the document pane, select a nontext page element, such as a figure and caption, and click the appropriate button
in the dialog box to tag it. Repeat until all page content is tagged.
Make Adobe PDF forms accessible
You can make form fields accessible to vision- and motion-challenged users by adding tags to the PDF and by properly
structuring it. In addition, you can use the tool tip form field property to provide the user with information about the
field or to provide instructions. For example, using the tool tip property value, the screen reader could say “Your
name.” Without the tool tip property, a screen reader simply names the type of form field.
1 If necessary, choose Forms > Add or Edit Fields, and make sure that the Select Object
tool is selected.
2 Double-click a selected form field to open the Properties window.
3 In the General tab, type a description into the tool tip box.
Note: If you use Designer ES for creating your form, you must run the screen reader before opening the form in Acrobat
in order to display accessibility tags with a flowable layout in Acrobat.
More Help topics
Add accessible links
With thoughtfully provided links, users can quickly move from one part of a document to another, to related
information in a different document, or to a website that is relevant to the content.
For URLs to be accessible to screen readers, you must convert them to active links and make sure that they are correctly
tagged in the PDF.
Note: If you tagged the Adobe PDF during conversion from an authoring application, the links and URLs in the document
are probably already active and included in the tag tree so that they are accessible to screen readers. You probably don’t
have to do this task unless you want to add more links.
Acrobat provides several ways to create active links for text, objects, and URLs in a PDF. However, the methods differ
in how they affect the tag tree. The best way to create accessible links is with the Create Link command.
Unlike the other methods for creating links in a tagged PDF (by using the Links tool or the Create From URLs In
Document command), the Create Link command adds all three tags that screen readers require in order to recognize
a link. The other methods create only one of the three tags, meaning that you must manually edit the tag tree to add
the remaining two tags for each link and place these tags in the proper reading order in the tree. Although you must
activate links one by one, using the Create Link command provides the fastest results and the least amount of follow-
up work to make the links accessible to screen readers.
The last thing to do is optional editing of the tag tree to add alternate text to the new links.
Creating links with Acrobat Standard doesn’t generate any tags for the links.
Do the following to make links active and add them to the tag tree:
1 Select the text or object for which you want to create a link.
2 Right-click the selection, and choose Create Link from the context menu.