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Watch this video to find out how to use the Accessibility checker in Adobe Acrobat.

Try to use a document format that will be accessible to most users. This is usually an HTML webpage.

You could also try tools like Microsoft Sway. This is an HTML format that you can design to create more engaging documents, like reports, similar to how you might create a PDF.

If you’re offering a downloadable document, choose a flexible format, like Word, or provide multiple formats so the user can choose the one most accessible to them.

If you want to use a PDF, remember it’s not a flexible document format. If your user needs to change text size, font, background colours and so on, they will not be able to do this in a PDF.

They can also be difficult to use with a magnifier or if you have motor difficulties, particularly on phone and tablet. Documents need to be accessible on whichever device you’re using.

These are access barriers regardless of whether you’ve created an accessible PDF. If you’re creating a PDF, you should always offer an accessible version alongside it. For example,

  • An HTML webpage
  • Excel spreadsheet
  • PowerPoint or Word document

If you need to provide a PDF, always:

  • follow accessibility best practices in the original document, like alt text
  • check tagging after conversion
  • if possible, test with a screen reader

If you’re using PowerPoint or Word before converting to PDF, use the Microsoft accessibility checker to help you.  Particularly for PowerPoint, you must check that:

  • the reading order is correct
  • decorative shapes are marked up as decorative
  • meaningful images have alt text
  • there are slide titles for each slide

Accessibility Resources

Here are some resources on how to make your PDFs as accessible as possible:

Checking the accessibility of existing PDFs

If you need to check and edit the accessibility of existing PDFs there are some tools that can help: