The Adobe Acrobat 8 family and accessibility

The Adobe® Acrobat® family — Acrobat 8 Professional, Acrobat 8 Standard, and Acrobat Elements software — includes powerful publishing tools that enable authors to create and optimize accessible Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files from almost any source document.

Committed partnerships

Through partnerships with leading screen reader companies, such as Dolphin Computer Access, Freedom Scientific, GW Micro, Ai Squared, and IBM, Adobe provides software products and technologies that enable people with blindness or low vision to use mainstream information technology. Acrobat 8 supports Microsoft Active Accessibility (MSAA), a standard that enables Windows® based programs to easily deliver information to assistive technologies.

What’s new for accessibility in Acrobat 8

The Adobe Acrobat 8 family has added new accessibility features and made improvements to features included in earlier versions.

New accessibility features

Form fields are now automatically recognized, created, and tagged for accessibility.
Accessibility for PDF forms that are noninteractive has been added.
A Table Inspector for improving the accessibility of tables in PDF files has been added to the Touch Up Read Order tool in Acrobat 8 Professional.

Improved accessibility features

The speed and accuracy of automatic tagging of PDF files has been improved.
Read Out Loud text to speech has been improved in Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader® to allow users to highlight the paragraphs being read. Users can now reverse direction while using Read Out Loud.
The Accessibility Checker in Acrobat 8 Professional has been improved, and additional tests for Section 508 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines have been added (WCAG 1 and WCAG 2 Draft).

Acrobat 8 products integrate with a broad range of assistive technologies, including:

Windows based MSAA-compliant screen readers
Screen magnification software
OCR/scanning software
Voice recognition software

The features and enhancements in Acrobat 8 enable content authors to make information more easily available to people with a broad range of disabilities — across multiple platforms and languages, including Japanese.

Acrobat 8 products

Products in the Acrobat 8 family offer different levels of functionality to address specific customer needs. All provide the features contained in Adobe Reader® 8 software plus powerful publishing tools that simplify the process of optimizing Adobe PDF files for accessibility, saving you time and improving the quality of your documents.

Acrobat 8 Elements

Acrobat 8 Elements (available mid-2007) is a volume-license-only product that offers basic creation of Adobe PDF files from any application. You can automatically tag the Adobe PDF files you create from Microsoft Office applications on the Windows platform for accessibility.

Acrobat 8 Standard

Acrobat 8 Standard enables easy creation, exchange, review, and approval of accessible Adobe PDF files. It includes all of the features available with Acrobat Elements, plus you can:

Convert existing PDF documents — including complex structures such as tables — to tagged Adobe PDF files
Make document content accessible to screen readers while still preventing copy and paste
Export text from PDF files to text (.txt) format, Rich Text Format (.rtf), XML, HTML, and Word (.doc)
Reduce the size of tagged PDF files for faster downloads
Create tagged Adobe PDF files within Microsoft Office 2000 and Office XP
Add text to scanned pages for improved accessibility

Acrobat 8 Professional

Acrobat 8 Professional includes all the features available with Acrobat 8 Standard as well as expert tools that help document authors optimize Adobe PDF documents and forms for accessibility. With Acrobat 8 Professional, you can also: