Make your Digital Media Projects Accessible

Headings are important because they help readers identify the main points of each section in the paper and allow someone with a screen reader to navigate the document.

• Use headings tags (e.g. H1, H2, H3) to ensure that people using assistive technology can distinguish between headings and regular body text.
• Do not use bold, italics or underline to convey a heading. Use proper heading tags to identify headings (e.g. H1, H2, H3, H4, etc.).
• Page titles should be labeled within an H1 tag, do no label titles with the Title tag. (e.g. an H2 heading called "Apples" becomes a subsection of an H1 headings called "Types of Fruit")
• Provide heading elements at the beginning of any important sections of content. This will help people use the browse-by-heading feature of their assistive technology.
• Do not skip levels when a heading is a subsection of another heading. (e.g. an H3 should not follow an H1).

Reading order is important because it helps the screen reader identify which order to read the document in.To set the reading order of the document, follow these steps:

1. Open your PDF in Adobe Acrobat Pro DC, select the Tools tab at the top of the screen and open the Accessibility Tab.

2. Put all elements in the correct reading order by using the Reading Order Tab ​

    

3. Use the Background or Artifact tag for elements which can be ignored by screen-readers, such as decorative images and text-box borders. Use the cursor to outline the section of the PDF in which you want to tag, then right click to access tagging options.  
4. Use the Heading (1-6) tags to convey meaningful structure and hierarchy in the PDF document.
5. Use the Figure tag for images so they are properly identified in PDFs.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is the process of turning image files into readable/recognizable text. This is important because screen readers cannot read images, therefore individuals who use a screen reader would not be able to access the information in a PDF if it originated as a scanned document. 

• Scanned images of text can be converted to PDF using OCR in Adoobe Acrobat Pro DC. 
• Adobe Acrobat Pro can then be used to create accessible text. 
  1. Select the Tools tab at the top of the screen and open the Enhance Scans tab.
  2. Click on the Enhance tab, select Scanned Document and ensure Recognize Text is selected.
  3. Click Enhance.

This guide has been adapted from: